The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We’re headed south down off Taos where the world is frozen, ice-packed and snow covered, temps down into the low teens. We’re headed for warmer weather — after all, we didn’t come for the skiing and snowball fights. We’re actually contemplating going to Texas. There’s a great Chris Rea song by that name. In a low growl he sings about how life where he is has gone to shit and he feels like he has to do something about it. His wife looks at him and asks’ what’? He says Texas. She asks ‘what’? He says Texas.

So … we’re saying Texas. Maybe. It’s a road trip now, meaning plans can change, plans will change, there may not be any plans. Have car, Will travel.

Karen and I fell in love on a road trip with my brother and his buddy, supposedly a backpacking trip to Idaho where Jeff had fought fires one summer after high school. We left Wisconsin in mid May. Flatlanders who didn’t realize the snows in the mountains don’t leave until June, maybe early, maybe late. First night we slept in the open next to hay bales in a North Dakota field, second night the snows covered our tent in the Big Horn Mountains. After a hasty conference we turned south, down through Wyoming and into Utah and kept going until we crossed into Mexico with Buck, Jeff’s 1963 Impala on its last legs. Mexico was 114 degrees in the shade.

The rest of the adventure was the stuff of tall tales for decades. Montezuma’s Revenge, poison oak, police stops, Federale bribes, sleeping on a sidewalk in downtown Tijuana, police bust at our San Clemente campground with larcenous surfers we let pitch tents on our site, backpacking Yosemite, kicked out of the Kalaloch Lodge for left wing political ranting around the time of Watergate,a final run in the dark with a battery going dead with no lights on drafting behind semi’s until Buck died 15 miles from home.

Road trip. It’s a movie. Karen and Skeeter got married. They lived happily ever after.

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