ON THE ROAD AGAIN--Trip 2

"On the road again..."
The line of the Willy Nelson song played over and over in my mind, as I carried jackets, book bag, camera case out to Little Red, our 16-year old Saturn.
"You're NOT taking all that!" boomed Andy, pointing at my pile of assorted paraphernalia on the family room floor.
"Sure I am," I half joked, not remembering exactly what I had piled there, how much of it I could live without for five weeks, or even whether all of it was mine."
"NO WAY!" he commanded. "You just try, and we won't go!"
"On the road again...," the words echoed in my mind.
Not go? No way! "Take it easy," I assured him. "Sorting through the pile is next on my list of things to do. Beds are changed; tomatoes are picked, sorted and packed; the last laundry is washing, and here's the cosmetic case," I told him, handing him one more item to load in the car.
An hour later at 1:03 p.m. we were on our way, heading south.
"On the road again... Oh, I wish that I could be on the road again..."
The words repeated in my head as we cruised along the Merritt Parkway toward New York. I hummed the melody as we crawled up the ramp approach to the George Washington Bridge in New York City and inched our way across the lower level to New Jersey.
"I can't wait to be on the road again..."
I sang the words as we sailed south. Little Red, now almost 17 years old with more than 107,000 miles, purred in time. Andy just let out a sigh of relief as we picked up speed and the temperature gauge dropped. For half an hour on the bridge, we had both feared the tiny engine would overheat and our adventure would stop before it started. Not so! The trusty Saturn kept humming past oil refineries, farm houses and fields of drying corn stalks and verdant expanses of vegetables and grasses.
I thought about John Steinbeck and his quest to see and understand America. Could he have experienced that same yearning to check out more country after his 1960 trip? Probably not. To me Travels with Charley conveyed his feelings of revulsion with what he experienced in the Deep South and a sense of confusion and disappointment in his almost maniacal race to return to his Long Island home to end his trip around the U.S.
We, on the other hand, are ready to roam. We are ON THE ROAD AGAIN ...