A milestone I'd be happy not to pass

Yesterday a long, eventful, pleasurable phase of my life passed into history: I sold my car, so from now on, other people drive me about.  I'm just a passenger. As the dealer drove my car away, I watched fondly as my personalized licence plate, LASTONE disappeared around the corner.

I quit while I was ahead, before I had any serious accidents, before I put other other road users and myself in harm's way. The body work of my car had a few dents and scratches due to minor errors of judgement when parking, not to violent encounters with other cars. Those dents and scratches are the tell-tale evidence of age-related decline in my judgement of distance, warning signals I probably ignored for a few years longer than was wise.

I've been driving since I was about 14-15 and have innumerable happy memories, as well as a tiny handful of unhappy ones. Memories of exploring Scotland and England, Canada and USA, Australia and New Zealand, from behind the steering wheel (actually, a less than perfect perspective because the driver must watch the road and traffic on it, not the scenery). Yet I was able to see much spectacular scenery in many parts of the world, often pausing on our travels so all of us in the family could admire it. 

There's another set of memories too.  I belong to the generation that conducted courtship in the privacy of a car. I did a bit more: I met the love of my life when I picked up a pair of young women who were hitch hiking, as I've related more than once in earlier posts on this blog. Those memories too are very pleasurable, and I'll treasure them along with all the other pleasurable memories I can call upon. I forget who said it and forget the elegant phrases in which the sentiment was couched, but I'm finding as many others before me have found, that a large part of what is pleasurable about growing old is in the life of the mind and all the memories stored in the mind. My long, eventful, worthwhile life has allowed me to accumulate rich tapestries, vast continents of meaningful memories. Almost all of them are happy memories. Either only a tiny minority are unhappy, or I am blessed with the capacity to remember happy events and times,to forget and suppress  unhappy ones. I am profoundly grateful for this fact.

Another Bastille Day

Bastille Day. I've had several memorable Bastille Days. In 1954 near the end of a back-packing holiday in Europe I'd looked forward to the final highlight, being in Paris for the Bastille Day festivities. But all the festivities were cancelled, even the floodlit fountains in Place de la Concorde darkened. The French had suffered a major military defeat: the Viet Cong had over-run the fortress of Dien Bien Phu.
In 1977 I flew to New York to sign the contract for my first go as editor of the huge reference textbook of public health, now known as Maxcy-Rosenau-Last. But electrical storms caused massive power outages. I had to walk up 37 flights to the luxury suite the publishers had reserved for me, and -- worse -- had to walk down next morning in total darkness; and a luxury lunch at a posh restaurant was off too, replaced by strip steak and luke warm root beer from a barrow outside the NY Public Library on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. I signed that first contract on Bastille Day 1977.

Memorable road trips

Last weekend's CBC Radio program "Fresh Air" included a segment on memorable and scenically spectacular road trips. I fired off an email reinforcement, mentioning a few of my own trips. 
Here's what I said:

The discussion about road trips reminded me how fortunate I’ve been.  In rough chronological order the most memorable have been the drive from Canberra to the south coast highway, and on to Sydney along a lovely coast past Sublime Point and Bulli Lookout, to Botany Bay — the rest of the drive into Sydney though heavily built up industrial areas is not as pleasant.

From Loch Lomond back to Edinburgh in our VW camper van, over the pass called Rest and Be Thankful. The first time we did this we couldn’t see much because of thick misty rain, and the journey was memorable mainly  for aromatic dog farts and carsick toddlers. Fortunately my wife and I made that trip again many years later, without carsick kids and farting Labrador puppies, on a sparkling sunny day when we could admire the scenery, which is some of the loveliest in Britain.

Ottawa to Cape Cod through upstate NY, across Lake Champlain then along the Interstate through Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The drive through Vermont and New Hampshire must be one of those rare excursions on which a busy expressway passes through such beautiful scenery.

Finally, perhaps most spectacular, several other trips in our VW camper van from Edinburgh to Northern Italy via the Rhine Valley and the Swiss Alps. Fortunately 5 years in Edinburgh gave us — our kids really — a chance to visit  some of the castles on both the left and right banks of the Rhine.  Adults like my wife and I thought most of the castles were rather over-rated but our 3 preteen kids loved them.

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In the course of my long and interesting life I've enjoyed innumerable road trips in many parts of the world: UK, Europe, North America, Colombia, South America, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, India, Sri Lanka. I must dust off my fading memories and write a coherent account of them. I won't attempt to say which is the 'best' of them, still less try to rank them in order according to any criteria. I can timidly offer the opinion that rail travel is often better than road, at any rate in much of Western Europe, and in Japan.