Travel Traditions

One travel tradition involves an old high school buddy of mine. His name is Dave Schiller, a.k.a., married with children.  I derive great pleasure in calling him from the middle of nowhere and ask him how rush hour is treating him. From there, the conversation turns trivial and somewhat silly. 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so instead of attempting a description of my phone call locale, I just take a photo of the place and show it to Dave when I get back in St. Louis. A couple of these photos have been included in this Blog installment. Also included are some campsite photos. 

The other tradition involves my brother, Scott Raisch. I like to mail him things from the West. This tradition goes back to the 1980’s. At that time he was living in Oregon. During a phone conversation he admitted to being a little homesick.

Feeling empathy for the situation he was in and being the caring brother that I am, I immediately went into the back yard, dug up some dirt and mailed it to him. Better yet, he kept it. He put it in a little dish and put the dish on top of his desk. His West Coast friends thought he was a vampire and a tradition was born. During the first Gulf War, I mailed him home sand from Saudi Arabia. We soldiers called it the beach with no surf. When I started taking my annual western trips this presented both a new opportunity and challenge. The challenge was what to mail him without violating any rules. That’s right things like this have rules; that is in addition to postal regulations.  Whatever I send has to be free, it has to have something to do with the road trip, and he can have no real use for it and has to be something I was going to throw away.  For example on my first trip to the Rockies, he was mailed a rock.  Other trips had him receiving a potato from Idaho with a note saying, “This spud's for you”. When I went to Montana he was sent bark and pine cones from the state tree.

Another item he received was a shower cap from a Best Western motel. You see my brother is follicle challenged. When it comes to hairline he takes after our dad’s side of the family. I take after the mailman. For some reason my mother has never liked that joke.

Still my favorite was mailing him a buffalo chip. It had been retrieved from Wind Cave National Park and placed in a bag decorated with buffaloes. Inside was a note that said, “Enclosed is dehydrated bison by product, to redehydrate just add water”.

The list goes on and on.  Do any of you have a suggestion toward the tradition?

In the next Blog installment I’ll try to put in some road adventures or, depending on the circumstances, misadventures.  Right now I’m in Casper, Wyoming, getting the truck welded … I broke it. 

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Email me at:  bar4916@yahoo.com