On the Road Again

Holiday Inn Express
Sweetwater, Texas

As most of you already know, Tim and I are movie fanatics. That being said, we have a little ritual we like to observe beginning a few weeks before any big trip. We search for films that somehow pertain to the places we will be visiting and watch one every week or so leading up to the date of our departure. For this trip, we loaded up our Netflix queue with titles that were either filmed in the west or involved road trips across the country - movies like Thelma and Louise, Sideways, and Easy Rider. The latter was supposed to be the quintessential American road trip film - a classic. We found it to be strange, even for us, and decided it was intended to be viewed while under the influence of at least a mild narcotic. But a few of the images in Easy Rider stuck with me: the disturbing scene in which a band of bigoted rednecks brutally murders a man simply because they were uncomfortable with his hippie lifestyle, the opening credits in which Peter Fonda sets out on his red, white, and blue Harley as Born to be Wild plays in the foreground, and the image of the other random actor beside him cruising down the open road through the desert wearing a cowboy hat. It was this last image that influenced my decision to buy my first cowboy hat ever a couple of weeks before our trip. I pictured myself driving that stretch of desert highway wearing my new iconic accessory, the wind whipping around me through the open windows of our rental car. What didn't occur to me is that cowboy hats aren't particularly aerodynamic, and the minute we hit the interstate going 70-80 miles per hour, I was clinging to my hat with both hands and stubbornly refusing to roll the windows up.