Page 78 - WCM 2021 Winter

ROAD TRIP!
Starter Pack for Adventure by William Clunie
Peter Williams
The Rangeley Lakes Trails Center’s trail system sprawls at the base of Saddleback Mountain.
“Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.”
~ Erol Ozan
Ask anybody what a road trip means to them, and you’ll get a million dif- ferent answers. As a child, my father would pile us up in the family car,
and head out to the local ice cream shop. After we’d selected our favorite dairy delights, he would point the wheels of the car out of town and me- ander through the countryside. The drive gave us all a chance to relax and reconnect, all in just a short distance from the little section of town where we lived. It was only a few miles afar, but those back roads offered vistas of farmland that us kids never dreamed lie such a short distance beyond our tiny neighborhood. But for other folks, a road trip is a hike to a distant mountain, or a pilgrimage to their place of birth. Or maybe it’s just a simple sojourn to a neighboring town for dinner.
As a high school teen, my buddies and I would stretch out much further from home, and explore wilder countryside on trips, some that led to overnight camping adventures. These early escapdes carried us away from the bustle
of our home territory: busy towns full of traffic, flashy storefronts, excessive noise, bright lights - you get the point. I purchased a Honda CB350, a combi- nation street or trail motorcycle, and it gave me the perfect excuse to hit the road, if for no other reason than to just hit the road. For me, that was the very basic definition of road trip.
Road trips are so much more about everything a tripper sees and does along the way, rather than a specific landing place. As an adventurous tripper, you just
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