Load Up the Family Truckster!

Here we are in the middle of what most of us think of as Summer since we are halfway between school letting out and school starting back up. Of course in reality, we are not even one full month into summer yet! Either way, summer is when most of us travel places other than to visit family--since the kids are out of school, the weather is not likely to cause travel problems, and amusement parks and such are all open.

A classic road trip stop.

When I was a kid back in the seventies, my dad would get a serious case of the wanderlust every summer and load us all in the car to head out and see something we had not before seen. We did not have a lot of money so we did these trips the tightwad way. The trunk of the car was stocked with a cooler, various groceries, a camp stove, and a few cooking utensils. Breakfast was either cereal or eggs cooked right in the motel rooms (!). I always thought this was great because we got those multipacks of little cereal boxes that you could cut down the side and convert into a bowl. For some reason, the cereal right out of the box tasted so much better! Lunch was a sandwich made and eaten in a roadside park, rest stop, or parking lot. For supper, we either had more sandwiches or we may have a meal at a restaurant if we could find something suitable (cheap).

Notice above, I said “motel,” not hotel, resort, inn, or bed and breakfast. By definition, a motel is a place of lodging where the rooms open to the outside and you can park your car right by your room. The word is actually a hybrid of “motor” and “hotel,” and came about after World War II when the grandest thing was to load the family in the car and go on an adventure. If you look along some of the old pre-interstate thoroughfares, you will find lots of old motels and motor courts. Back in the seventies, they were getting a little run down which is why they were usually very inexpensive. There were many nights when my brother and I slept in sleeping bags on the floor of these motels so we would not have to pay for extra beds. The thought gives me the willies now, but we turned out just fine.

Great local food--fish tacos in San Francisco

One advantage (or disadvantage, depending on your outlook) of traveling on the cheap as we did is that

you become much more intimately acquainted with the places you visit in a way you would never experience with more packaged experiences such as resorts, chain hotels, and chain restaurants. We visited grocery stores and local diners all over the country—two places that reveal much about local cultures and lifestyles. I credit these summer adventures as being a major part of my education and giving me a lifetime of fuel to feed an overactive mind.

This style of traveling is certainly still available to us today, although I believe I would leave out the campstove in the motel rooms and the sleeping bags on the motel floors. We really do not need to travel thousands of miles to find a new perspective. Sometimes all we need to do is to spend a day or two being a traveler in our own area or our own state. Go to a small town where you have only traveled through in the past, or go to a big city, but avoid the malls and instead head downtown. Find some museums and some old-fashioned diners. In many places you will find the old motels have been renovated to the point that some are downright upscale. Get the book “WeirdTexas” and make it your business to see everything listed in person—now that would be an adventure!! By all means, tell me what you find!

A couple of signs you won't
see in Texas!

Summer is for Foodies

There is no doubt that Americans are spoiled rotten in the area of food, especially produce. Back in “the day,” you were aware that fruits and vegetables had specific seasons in which they were available. If you wanted something that was out of season, you either settled for a really bad version of it, paid an exorbitant price for it, or both! Back when I worked for a caterer, we had a January bride insistent upon having at her reception a basket cut from a fresh watermelon and filled with summer fruits. After much searching, we found a nice, big watermelon for which we paid just over fifty dollars. Now, of course, you can get those “personal” watermelons year-around, but they never taste quite as good as an in-season watermelon.

Even in this day of having all manner of greenhouse and hydroponic vegetables and fruits along with those flown in from other hemispheres, it is still hard to beat the flavor of a tomato grown in someone’s yard. My son has recently discovered the deliciousness of Fleur de Sel de Camargue. While this sea salt is delicious on anything, including your finger, it is pure heaven sprinkled atop a slice of home-grown tomato with a fresh basil leaf garnish. This is a pleasure that can only be experienced in the summer.

In a rural community like ours, one hears lots of complaints this time of year about squash. I have heard stories of people refusing to answer their doorbells for fear that someone is going to try to give them zucchini or of grocery sacks of yellow squash being anonymously left on someone’s front porch or in the bed of their pickup. What an embarrassment of riches! Last week I confessed to having purchased squash at the grocery store, much to my gardening friends’ horror.

Then there are the peaches—unless it has been a very unfortunate weather year. Last week I bought some California white peaches at Central Market. They are good, but a poor substitute for a peach bought right out of the orchard. On a trip through central Georgia two years ago we bought some peaches—the kind that require several paper towels to mop up the juice that runs down your elbows. I can still remember that wonderful fragrance and how perfect they looked with that deep pink blush along one side.

One of my favorite things about summer is fresh basil. I do not have any right now, but will be starting some soon. I have grown every kind of basil imaginable—globe, Genovese, cinnamon, Thai, purple ruffles, etc. Besides being tasty, basil is a beautiful plant and is very fragrant. There is no substitute for fresh basil. All of the preservation methods I have tried fail to capture the full flavor, so this is truly a summer-only experience.

There are so many more summer foodie experiences I could list—sweet corn, fresh Hatch chiles, Pecos cantaloupes, berries of all kinds—so dreamy! What are your favorite summer foodie experiences? 

Looking in All the Wrong Places

Yesterday at church, the Father’s Day sermon was about teaching your children, training them up, raising them right. The scripture was from Deuteronomy, a book that, according to my study Bible was written in 1406 B.C., 3219 years ago by my mental math. The scripture was about how the Hebrews were being told to clean up their act and get it together before they crossed into the promised land. The pastor talked about how drastically our culture has shifted recently. A young person sitting nearby expressed doubt that the change has been recent, commenting that the culture has been changing since the sixties.

The further context of this includes the reports from my husband and son about their observations of the prevailing culture in South Africa, where they recently spent two weeks. Some would say that South Africa is just “behind the times” with their emphasis on family, conservative dress and behavior, limited consumption of popular media, and methods of conducting public education for school-age kids. Even though I did not go along on the trip and see all of this first-hand, I have still required quite a lot of time to sit in my rocking chair on the front porch while I try to mentally digest all of the information they have fed me.

While there are many, many reasons I am thankful I live in this era instead of at any point in the past—modern medical and dental care are biggies, the ability of a woman to make her way alone in the world is another, and the ability to communicate instantly with friends and family around the world is a nice bonus—there are aspects of being “behind the times” a la South Africa that look pretty good to me. Above, I mentioned the age of Deuteronomy in order to bring attention to the timelessness of the behavior of humans and the enduring validity of the moral and ethical rules laid out in that book. You do not need to be a Christian or a Jew or any other religion to realize that we, humans, need standards of behavior in order to be effective in life.

On the one hand, it seems that the American culture has thrown standards right out the window. After thinking about it, though, I think the problem is that we get our standards from all the wrong places. All of the media in which we are all up to our necks (television, movies, music, videogames, and internet, for example) seems to be the source of most of our standards. Behavioral science has documented that children who are not being actively taught and guided by parents will adopt what they see in the media as reality and derive their standards from it. Do we really want our every day lives to mirror sitcoms? Or worse yet, “reality” shows? Many of us seem to get our standards from various celebrities. What percentage of celebrities are people of real character or intellect? Many of us rely on lawmakers to set standards for us. Need I say more about relying on politicians to set our standards? The latest legislation signed into law protects the rights of school employees to say “Happy Hanukah,” or “Merry Christmas” to students without fear of legal retribution. How does that grab you?

I am no different and certainly not any better human being than any of you who are reading this. I find myself constantly battling the pull of modern society to conform to whatever the standard of the day may be. The challenge for most of us is to step back mentally from the busy-ness of every day to see exactly what it is that we are doing and where we are heading. An even greater challenge is to swim against the tide by setting and adhering to a solid set of standards, based on time-proven principles. If you decide to swim upstream, know that you are not alone and know that your efforts will be appreciated.