27, Thursday February 2025 Circuitous Road Trips of The Senior Mind.

 This week I drove the truck to pick up our completed taxes. The temperature was 35-degrees above zero, 52 degrees warmer than last week. I left later in the afternoon too, after deciding to take the gravel roads and go cross-country, than stick to the boring stretches of laser-straight county highways. I planned to come out on the north side Strathcona where a Cenex Gas station and a cafe called Paradise, as well as the nearby accounting office sits parallel to Minnesota Hwy 32.

 As I left home home, I pushed my new cool-guy ear pods in and called my old friend Kerry, from Carlisle, Iowa, whom I've known for about 58 years. He's a long-retired individual with some serious time on his hands who doesn't mind me calling on occasion; the oft time occasion being when I'm on a road-trip. 

 

 If you've read the Wannaskan Almanac for a few years, you may vaguely remember when, on a similarly nice day, I was talking to Kerry, when as I traversed a Beltrami Island Forest road, I suddenly discovered I was driving down a snowmobile trail instead of a road. Profanely expressing as much, I said a quick goodbye to Kerry, and stopped the truck dead in its tracks before I would regrettably drop a wheel in the ditch, and began backing up on my own tracks about an eighth of a mile (660 feet) using only my side-mirrors. I was successful.

 

 You'd think I would've learned my lesson, but as it is, I have him to blame for being a distraction. This year, he's possibly to blame again, but don't  interpret that as a spoiler alert. Nothing really happened ... except I drove quite a bit farther than I intended. This time I didn't have to swear nor stop where I was. This time my cellphone lost reception as there wasn't a cell tower anywhere close, even on the sand-ridge.

Kerry and Steve as two much younger old friends.

 I drove along a Bur oak-lined ridge, off Marshall County 48, that Chairman Joe and I call The Bobcat Trail. It was there, after turning south off #48, in the middle of this minimum-maintenance one-lane road, that having lapsed into routine my brain subtly indicated I hadn't turned where I should have. I was in the wrong spot, gone the wrong direction; and because of the snow-packed icy-road conditions I couldn't just turn around and go back the way I came. (Backing up over the ridge was out of the question as other vehicles use the road too.)

 

 So, I drove down off the ridge about 2 miles to Marshall County 6 where I could have turned around, but instead, I just turned west there and headed toward Middle River, about 10 miles away; chuckling even as I turned north, onto Hwy 32, toward my original destination of Strathcona, another eight. Thanks, Kerry.