Opinion : Just following our noses...

Yesterday we hopped in the car to do a couple things.

We needed to take some pictures and thought we’d grab some lunch while out and about.

(Plus we didn’t tell anyone we were celebrating our anniversary early, because we are still convinced that if anything can go wrong, it will be because it’s a birthday or anniversary, so we just try to quietly sneak through without some “memorable” event.)

We headed to the southern part of the county. Because we thought we knew where we were going, why grab a map or mapquest it? I mean seriously, the county isn’t that big, surely we can drive right to where we are going…right…

We drove through Blairstown and at that point our navigator said, “I think we were supposed to turn right back there, but we’ll keep going, there’s another paved road up here.”

We kept going.

We passed another “paved road” that we decided was not paved but blacktop, so we didn’t turn there.

Then we saw the sign that told us the Amanas was only 9 miles away.

Hmmm…well, we did want to go out for lunch, so you’d think we’d follow that road, but no, instead of going that direction we took a right.

As we drove, we started to pull out the electronic gadgets, because, the map we thought we had in the car…was not in the car.

We gave up on the gadgets shortly after firing them up. They are hard to see in the sunlight AND hard to read, yes, we are officially that age.

So being the brave adventurers, we continue.

When I was a kid, my dad would throw us in the car and when asked where we were headed, the answer was, “We’re just following our nose.” Later we realized that meant HE knew where we were going, but made us believe that we were just driving randomly around. We always ended up in some neat location, or once in a while, we really did just drive around.

However, since my dad wasn’t in the car, I wasn’t so sure we’d make it home to get the news out today.

We finally found the next town, and after looking at the gas gauge, which doesn’t work I should add, I checked the trip meter and it indicated that we had better fill up for the next leg of our trip.

We pulled in and “filled up”…it took a whopping 5 gallons of gas, so perhaps, my trip meter is broken, or perhaps the gas attendant didn’t fill the tank completely, aw who knows? With 5 gallons, we’re good for another 100 miles, give or take…

We head on out of town after we discover that we need to go west.

Now which way is west? When it’s cloudy and you are just randomly driving around, who pays attention to which direction you are going? I mean after all the mirror has a built in compass in it…oh wait, maybe it doesn’t was it the last car? Or is there a fuse blown?

We debate about which direction west is, and find that my internal compass had reset and we found our way out of town.

Finally, we locate the town we were looking for.

We realize on our trip that, wow, Benton County is huge. We had driven from one end to…well…past the other.

We saw so many huge farms in our little corner of the heartland.

We saw many abandoned, large buildings.

It was sad to see many of them falling down because in their heyday they were magnificent creations, but now no one can afford to maintain them. And then I wondered if that was the future for the Braille School buildings. Such a waste.

The second thing that I realized was that all of these people, far from us geographically, were reading our website.

Yeah, I still can’t wrap my head around the numbers that we are seeing.

It’s just crazy.

For a little bitty business, that’s never advertised, to realize that most people know who you are, well, it’s just crazy.

But anyway, we did what we had set out to do on our day trip. We grabbed some lunch and even found our way home…all in the same day.

We came home to relax and get ready for the next day. Today. And for this week.

And also realize, how good it was to be home…