I have started my “retirement” & travels to be able to
share what this great land has to offer to all of us if we will just slow down
and look for it! But I have not found a better way to describe what it is like
than the below description of the “back roads” of Australia once you leave the
bustling cities…it is like stepping back in time!! I thank Bill Bryson for this
very vivid & accurate description of what can still be found in the U.S. if
we will just slow down and “try it on for size” sometimes!
From the book “In A Sunburned Country” by Bill Bryson
“Partly, too, it was to do with the road. Almost all
Australian highways are still just two lanes wide, and what a difference that
makes. You’re not cut off from the wider world, as you are on a superhighway,
but part of it, intimately connected. All the million details of the landscape
are there beside you, up close, not blurred into some distant, tediously epic
backdrop. It changes your whole outlook. There’s no point in hurrying when all
it’s going to do is put you in the feathery wake of that old chicken truck half
a mile ahead. Might as well hold back and enjoy the scenery. So there’s none of
that mad, pointless urgency ---gotta pass this guy, gotta keep pushing, gotta make
some miles --- that makes any drive on an interstate such an exhausting and unsatisfying
business. When you come to a town on such a road it is an event. You don’t fly through
at speed, but slow down and glide through,
in a stately manner, like a float in a parade, slow enough to nod to
pedestrians if you wish and to check out the goods in the windows on Main
Street. “Oh, that’s a good price on men’s double-knit shirts,” you observe in a
thoughtful tone, or “Those lawn chairs were cheaper in Bathurst,” for, needless
to say, you are talking to yourself by now. Sometimes ---quite often, in fact
--- you stop for a coffee and a browse around the shops. ....... You lean an arm on the windowsill, lay a finger on the wheel, and cruise. You haven't done this for years. You haven't been on a drive like this since you were a kid. You'd forgotten motoring could be fun. I loved it. “
These pics are from Joshua & myself...but they tell part of the feeling I have and that Bill describes....we all have fallen to the "tyranny of the urgent" in this life we lead....but are we really "living"??
Just something to think about on this Friday as we start a weekend.
How busy are we going to be?????
C'ya out here on the road soon.....I hope!!!
Frog
🐸🚐🌄
