Travels with Barry

I have been giving a lot of thought to traveling this week. It is one of the central themes of my life. I began this piece heading in a different direction, but it has taken one a life of it's own. I will continue later on in the week with a follow up to this piece that more closely approaches the ideas I was trying to express. Until then, I give you an ode to my father. Travels with Barry.

My parents were gypsies. My dad is from a tiny town in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. (Its population in the year 2000 was 1,841 people. Personally, I have never seen more than 10 people in the entire town.) He joined the Navy soon after high school and met my mother through mutual friends while home on leave. My mother grew up in the booming metropolis of Amsterdam, New York. (Population in 2006 was 17,758.) My mom had one mission in life. Simply put, get the hell out of dodge. My dad looked like a good prospect and was kind of cute. In 1961, they joined forces and left upstate New York behind. They did not return for over 40 years. Together they traversed the east coast and, in good Catholic non-television watching tradition, produced six offspring along the way. Being the youngest, I was spared the bulk of the moving experience. My older brother and oldest sister both attended over ten schools in their first twelve years of education. By contrast, I only attended four different ones.

Still the traveling bug was in my genes. When I was growing up, my dad was the king of the road trip. (He still is truthfully.) I had already seen most of the fifty states by the time I was 18 thanks to my father. We were always jaunting off to some event, some battlefield memorial, or to visit relatives who predictably did not leave the state of New York. Before I had graduated high school, I had logged many an hour as a passenger on the Barry Chase express. We drove to California one summer to drop off a car for my sister. We drove to Minnesota one summer. Why? I cannot remember. We did not know anyone in Minnesota. Minnesota is not a bad place, do not get me wrong. But who just goes to Minnesota on a whim? My dad, that is who.

Please take note; traveling with my father is not a normal experience. When one goes on a road trip, how do you imagine it would occur? Start out about 9 or 10 AM, right? Drive until about 5 or 6 PM, and then stop at a motel or a campground. Eat something, relax, then repeat on subsequent days until you get there, right? Wrong. Welcome to Travels with Barry.

Travels with Barry involves many rituals. I will do my best to be brief, yet thorough in my attempt to paint a picture for you.

1. Our cars were never (what is the proper word?), um, safe, reliable, or working. (Any combination of these is applicable at one time or another). My dad is a talented and skilled mechanic who has always worked on and fixed his cars. That being said, we were a big family and money was always tight. So my dad always bought used and kept the cars running as best he could. Breaking down was a not too uncommon part of the trip. Water pumps, starters, alternators, transmissions, all of these and more were replaced as we journeyed across the United States. If we got home from a trip without breaking down, all uttered thankful prayers. I remember two specific vehicles that I spent a lot of time in. A gold Ford Pinto Wagon, one of at least two Pintos my family owned at one time or another. This particular vehicle eventually rusted to the point that if you were sitting in one of the two front seats and there was water on the roads, you would have to press down hard on the floor mats to keep the water from spraying up through the floor. The second is a white Ford LTD Country Squire Station Wagon with faux wood trim. This car had an interesting, if not slightly dangerous habit of losing its brakes at the most inopportune times. Like...when you needed to slow the car down. The pedal would hit the floor and who knew when it was coming back up? My mother and I had a memorable experience flying through a red light at a particularly busy intersection in our hometown of New Hampshire at the time. (Route 102 and Mammoth Road for those of you in the know. Southbound Mammoth Road, through a red light at about 30 or 40 mph? Good times.)

2. Scheduling is a key component of Travels with Barry. Why would you leave at 9 or 10 AM like everyone else? My father would excitedly exclaim, "That's when everyone is leaving! We'll never make it through _________ at that time of the day!" (Fill in the blank...Boston, Albany, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Atlanta. My father, well before traffic reports, always knew the traffic flow of the nation.) My father's preferred time to leave was sometime between 2 AM and 5 AM. "We'll beat all of that traffic!" he would declare with a gleam in his eye. So into the car we would pile at 2 AM. Also take note that there were 8 of us when I was young. Six kids of varying ages and two adults. There was not a lot of personal space. (I distinctly recall falling asleep at the age of ten or so on the laps of one or two of my unhappy and uncomfortable sisters during one of our breakdown episodes. Actually, did we squeeze all eight of us in my brother's Honda Accord one night when we broke down? This is coming back to me now. Good times! Granted a Honda Accord is only designed to hold four people, but my family never paid attention to silly ideas like that.) Not only were we usually traveling in a dilapidated Ford Station Wagon, but also we usually had a dilapidated trailer in tow. Another reason my father's preferred departure time was in the middle of the night was because it took him until 2 or 3 AM to get the signal lights of the trailer working. Looking back on it, I have no idea what took so long.

3. Another important component to the Travels with Barry experience is the search for low priced gas. On top of studying national traffic flows in his free time, my father also closely monitored the price of petrol at approximately 200-300 gas stations within a 60-mile radius of our home. If a particular station was 3 cents less a gallon, we would drive 20 miles outside of our way to visit said station. Granted with the station wagon getting 10 miles a gallon at best, we were eating up most of our 3 cents a gallon in savings just going to and from the station. Still, not an issue for my father. One of the principal rules of Travels with Barry. One will NEVER compromise on the price of gas.

Directly related to this topic is the issue of running out of gas. Between my father's thirst for a bargain and the unreliability of gas gauges in our vehicles, running out of gas was not an unusual occurrence. However, if you attempted to breach the topic of getting gas with my father, the usual answer was, "Aww, we've got enough. I want to stop in ______ (again, fill in the blank). Gas will be cheaper there." The other issue in the gas equation was my mother. Being the not so quiet woman that she is, she would never fail to bring up the issue. "Barry, do we need gas? Should we stop for gas?" My father would smelled the challenge to his stronghold on power and bit every time. Even if he had been contemplating stopping, we would now not be stopping 'til the low fuel light was on. If it was even working.

4. Driving a potentially hazardous vehicle is not enough of a challenge, truth be told. Therefore if one is able to tow ANYTHING behind it, do it. Throughout various trips, we towed multiple types of cargo trailers, passenger campers, and an antique 57 Chevy at one point too. Why? To increase the difficulty factor and incidence of a life threatening accident. Travels with Barry is not for the faint of heart. (On the Minnesota trip, we almost went off a cliff in Canada with a 78 Ford Bronco that my father still has ("It still runs great!") and our old Shasta trailer. Good times. I cannot remember if the tires on the trailer had all blown out or if the trailer did not have brakes. It could have been both.)

5. Snacks for the car are a key factor in Travels with Barry. My dad has a particular affection for Brach's Lemon Drops. Whenever he is about to pass out from exhaustion after 16 hours behind the wheel, the familiar crinkle of the Lemon Drops bag is heard. Barry rarely relinquished the driver's seat unless we were in an all out dash to get somewhere in a HURRY (usually a wedding of one of my twenty plus cousins). Worse case scenario, Barry would drive eighteen hours. He would then have Barbara (my mom) take over the driving for four hours at the most. He would then resume driving for another 18 hours until we had reached our destination. I distinctly remember the family driving from Orlando, Florida to our home in New Hampshire with only bathroom breaks. I do not recall if my dad relinquished the driver's seat on that trip. Likely not. Ok, back to the food. A cooler is a MUST on any Travels with Barry trip. There are usually at least two to three coolers in any vehicle. You never know when you may need ice. (Come to think of it, if any of us ever had been seriously injured, we would have been set in the ice department. I wonder if this was part of my father's secret plan.) These coolers are usually circa 1969-1978 vintage. Who cares if they were manufactured with toxic materials thirty to forty years ago? As long as they do not leak, they will never be discarded. The coolers are filled with sodas, old lunchmeat, soggy bread, and the ice is only changed when it is completely melted. Depending on how few times one stops, this could be days. Note to readers who may decide to embark on a Travels with Barry excursion after reading this, if you buy the lunch meats from the grocery store that have the most preservatives, they will last for days in the above described cooler situation.

6. In a topic related to #5, stops or rest breaks are discouraged in Travels with Barry unless there is something of value to be seen. I have no doubt that if it were possible to build a freeway from California to Hawaii, my father would want to drive it. The only thing that stops my father is bathroom breaks and fuel stops. (Thankfully, with age he is forced to take more of these now.) Just give him his cooler and his Lemon Drops and he is good to go for a good long while.

7. Another key element in Travels with Barry is the "shortcut". The minute any type of traffic back up was sighted or even suggested at, the Chase family exited the freeway. My father would drive in the direction we were headed, confident that all roads lead to the same destination. Our lives were like the Robert Frost poem. We took the road less traveled...though I am not sure we were better for it. Usually enduring five minutes of stop and go traffic that an accident caused on the freeway would have gotten us to our destination a heck of a lot quicker than the "over the river and through the woods" approach which my father employed. The "shortcut" also came in handy in another of my father's favorite past times. Toll avoidance. Why pay to drive on a toll road when local state roads are FREE? I remember one particular toll in New Hampshire that my father would drive at least ten miles extra to avoid the 50 cent toll at the time. My father was not giving the government any more of his hard earned money than he absolutely had to.

I hope this gives you a taste of what it is like road tripping with my dad. I love him dearly, he is one of the smartest, most interesting, and most wonderful people I will ever know in my life. He has been nothing, but supportive and loving throughout my entire life and I am eternally grateful for this. Traveling with him was definitely a bit traumatizing looking back on it, but it is fun to look back on now and laugh heartily at. What does not kill you makes you stronger.

I am tired and headed for bed. Cuidate.