Except my readers, who will hear about nuisance and delays because it’s an integral part of the meaning of travel for Carol and me. Carol handles nuisance and delay with the peace of a monk and the patience of a pointillist painter. My handling varies, but tends toward an Indiana Jones sense of imminent peril. Between the two of us, we have a travel approach that is a comforting blend of serenity and an urgent sense of gloom.

  I’d managed to book us into yet another disappointing accommodation for our last stop on our Wild West adventure. To top it off, I’d booked us in for two days. Two days in a place that when Carol looked up what there was  to do there as we were driving towards it, reported to me, “There’s no there there.”

  Once I’m going, I want to keep going. So when Carol suggested another stop at yet another scenic overlook, I wanted to vote against it. As is only occasionally the case with Carol’s suggestions, the decision was made before all the votes were counted.

   Nostalgia, when done right, is charming. When we rolled into Williams, AZ prior to our train trip to the Grand Canyon, I felt we had discovered a little town that had gotten nostalgia just right. Carol was still a bit unsettled from seeing our accommodations for the next two nights. Even after I had explained how the guy backing up next to us in his pickup with his personal belongings neatly tied off in hefty bags had made his reservation using Expedia.com, she remained skeptical, suspecting I’d once again booked us into a hotel occupied by characters in a Rob Zombie movie.

   I can sum up my initial view of the Grand Canyon this way: totally fake. There is no way a river is responsible for what you see here. The Mississippi River has been depositing Minnesota onto Louisiana for eons, but it still looks like Louisiana, which is to say, an unreclaimed swamp. That’s what rivers are supposed to do. They do not paint breathtaking landscapes like they were van Gogh or Monet. Even the little kid standing next to me told his mommy, “it looks fake.”

    It was the day Carol looked into the living room and didn’t see me on the couch. She called out for me. The thing was, I was sitting on the couch as I’d been for the last whenever. “I’m right here,” I said waving to her, a wan smile on my face. When I realized that she could no long discern my outline on the couch from that of the couch itself, I said, “We need a road trip.”

    In the aftermath of Hurricane Betsy in 1965, much of St. Bernard Parish and Chalmette were flooded to a depth of about five feet. These were the days before federal flood insurance and FEMA trailers. What was available was a loan from the Small Business Association, which my parents dutifully took out and repaid just in time for Hurricane Katrina.

   My family’s roots are submerged in the bayous of Louisiana. If you think Louisiana is the armpit of the country, then the bayous are the pit hairs.

   My grandparents raised eight kids on little more than what could be hooked, dragged, dredged, gigged or netted out of Bayou Des Allemands. My grandfather was a barber; my grandmother ran an ice cream parlor. Between my grandfather not charging the Depression-devastated inhabitants for their haircuts and my grandmother frightening the children who came in her shop at the wrong time for ice cream, my grandparents eventually lit out for greener pastures: the reclaimed malarial swamp known as Chalmette, where I grew up.

  With time on my hands now, I used part of it to noodle around my ambivalent attitude towards authority, resulting in a liberalism that believes in government as a force for good and resents its intrusiveness at the same time.

   As with everything else in life, it started with my parents. As nurturers, they expanded the “children should be seen and not heard” maxim to include not being seen either. In summer we were sent out from the house after breakfast into the stifling heat of New Orleans and told not to return until dinner. Left to forage for lunch, we learned to distinguish the hard way between poison mushrooms and berries and the good ones.

I asked Carol if she thought I should go on hiatus from the blog now that our travels were done for a while.

   “I suppose the readers could use a break,” she said.