Mark's Blog

Sherrylee and I love road trips!  I’m talking about where you throw stuff in the car, take off, and drive for hours and hours.  In this day of instant gratification, which includes getting to places quickly from wherever we are, road trips seem a thing of the past, but since I’m writing this in the breakfast room of a Holiday Inn Express in Pecos, Texas—8 hours from Fort Worth and 12 hours from Escondido, CA.—I want to tell you about ours, so you can see what you think.

Yesterday about 11am, we decided that I needed to go to Escondido, where LST is sending a YoungFriends group from Dallas for a week-long mission trip. We sometimes do this to simply provide a little help to both the group sponsor and the hosting church. Since our daughter Emily and her family are in Escondido, Sherry wanted to go too, but have you looked at last minute ticket prices lately! She suggested that we leave right away and drive—1394 miles—19+hours!  In less than 10 minutes, we had decided to do it—so we agreed to leave at 2pm.

She went to the Hair Cabin for whatever, and I tied up stuff at the office, then stopped the mail for 10 days, ate lunch with the staff, and went home to pack.  Packing for road trips is soooooo easy because you don’t have to worry about weight, you don’t have to worry about how many ounces of liquid, you can take your good shoes, your running shoes, AND your flipflops—and they don’t even have to go in the suitcase. The best of all is being able to hang your clothes in the backseat. What a luxury!

We were almost giddy as we drove out of the city right before rush-hour traffic—about 3:30, not 2pm—but that’s OK.  The first thing we did was play the alphabet game. What—you’ve never played. You have to find all the letters in proper sequence, call out the word that contains the letter—which means your opponent can’t use that letter in that word—and you can’t look backwards!  Oh, yes, and it has to be on a sign, not anything moving.  Sherry and I are fierce competitors, so I will confess to one tense moment when we both saw the J in Justin Boots at the same time. I think I really beat her, but it was so early in the trip, we agreed to both claim it as a tie—any sacrifice for matrimonial harmony!  Ultimately my generosity paid off because I found the Z in pizza just outside of Abilene and won.  We’ll see what happens today!

And we always stop at Crackerbarrel restaurants on road trips—mostly because of all the fun things you can do there!  First, you can walk around and say, “Who do you think would buy something like that?” Then we look at the pictures on the wall and see if any of our forefathers are memorialized in their antique pictures—well, those pictures are of somebody’s people!! Don’t laugh.  Then we always try to beat the little triangle peg game that they put on each table.  Sherry was obsessed yesterday, so I cheated and found a clue on the internet about where to start that let both of us beat it once—but then we couldn’t repeat, so I bought her one to bring on the trip as we left. Oops, now I know who buys that stuff!!

Don’t forget to go to the bathroom at Crackerbarrel—except be careful. In nine out of ten Crackerbarrels, the men’s room is on the left and the women’s on the right, which only sets us Stammkunden up for an embarrassing moment if we ever walk into the exception! I’ve done it several times, I confess.

Next we listened to 4-5 episodes of Garrison Keillor’s Stories from Lake Wobegon podcasts off the ITouch that my kids gave me several years ago! What great kids. We tried listening to Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which I had downloaded for free a couple of months ago. It was a little heavy for the mood yesterday, but it might work today.  If not, we’ll stop at the next Crackerbarrel and rent an audiobook on CD—see why we always go there!

We pulled into Pecos, Texas about 11:15 last night, couldn’t find the hotel, drove around until we found something open where we could ask. Soon we were in our room—but the toilet was broken—so then we were in another room, tired, but glad we were on the road—together!

I wonder what today will bring?