Eyes Turning South

Now that ‘little problems’ are off my mind I’m starting to actually think about our trip South.  I think I shared our route already, if not here it is again.

However, just because there’s a blue line on the map that doesn’t mean that’s the way we’re going to travel.  I’m starting to look at some of the smaller routes at least for the distance between Elkhart and Hot Springs.

The way we’ve laid out our trip we’ve given ourselves slap on 14 days to make the 1700 mile trip.   That’s not terrible fast.  For a North / South migration it’s quicker than we normally would travel.  Heck — we’ve been known to stop for a month in just one spot along the way!  But this year I think 2 weeks will be about right.

“Like all great travellers,
I have seen more than I remember,
and remember more than I have seen.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

I’m absolutely unsure about any stop between Elkhart and Hot Springs AR.  We’ll probably do that as walk-ins even though I have potential stopping points on the map.  As it is now there’s a long distance of +/- 450 miles between Gun Creek and Arlie Moore and I’m not likely to actually do that in one day.  I’m sure we could if we stayed on the interstate but I’m not all that inclined to stay on the interstate at this point.

All of which relates to that Disraeli quotation in an odd sort of way…

Do you ever have that problem of seeing more than you remember and remembering more than you see? Our brains knowingly take liberties with the truth.  Memory is a strange animal and we remember things differently than they occur.  There are myriad stories about the unreliablity of “eyewitnesses”  and I have read studies that indicate our memories of events long ago are not memories of the original event but rather are memories of the way we last remembered them — which is significantly different.  That means that if we accentuate one aspect of a memory because of something that’s going on in our lives at the moment that we accordingly record that old memory with an updated take on what happened — not on what originally occurred.

With over a million driving miles on the clock I have been on a lot of roads. Sometimes I find myself confusing towns that have a Washington Street — I might remember the buildings on one Washington Street as if they were in another community.  Or I remember the right route, but before it was repaved, or re-routed.  More than once we’ve been driving down a highway that recently had been re-routed and our GPS got confused — showing us as driving down the middle of a field as the map database had not yet been updated from the old route — well, sometimes I’ve felt that way in my own memory.  I know where I am, just one iteration earlier. 

When it comes to route planning I know places will have changed from the last time I visited them.  By this time, some of those places have not been seen for 30, 40, 0r nearly 50 years.  I know better than to expect them to be the ‘same’ — but who can help but expect things to be as you remember them?  It’s really a conundrum, don’t you think?

I wonder, too, how much of memory is affected by our conversations?  There are times I’m not sure if I’m remembering something, or actually remembering someone else’s recollection heard during conversation.  There are times when the details of a supposed memory seem lacking and yet I think I should remember being there even if I can’t put a date or season to the memory.

Oh well…  Maybe I’ll just look at the map, and take a stab at a route!

Thanks for stopping by; I’ll be here tomorrow, why not stop by and say hi!