Home Again, Home Again, Jiggedy-Jog

We're back home and despite my fondness for travel, I agree with John Denver: "Hey, it's good to be back home again." I think I probably wrote something along these lines after our previous return home. If you like being home and you like traveling, you have the best of both worlds. I didn't travel much as a child. Vacations were few and far between. I guess that's the way it goes when a family doesn't have a lot of money and the kids keep coming. Some families get around this by camping, but we didn't do camping. It was no surprise then that by the time I left home to go to college, I wanted desperately to travel and see the world. My first jaunt out on my own was pretty much a disaster. I told my mother I was going to Atlanta to spend a long July Fourth weekend with a college friend at Georgia Tech. Instead, I hopped on a bus and bought a ticket to Washington, D.C. As luck would have it, the bus broke down in the middle of Hot-As-Hell, North Carolina, and we had to wait hours by the side of the road waiting for a replacement to take us the rest of the way. By the time we got to D.C., it was late at night and my time was running out so I spent a few hours wandering some mean streets (mostly strip clubs and bars) before getting back on a bus headed back to Atlanta. Only I had miscalculated the fare or had not calculated having to eat on the journey and could only afford a ticket to Columbia, S.C. After arriving in Columbia (which was hotter than hell), I began hitchhiking and things went well until I found myself in Nowhere, Georgia, on a road that nobody seemed to be traveling. I walked for several miles before coming on a farmhouse. They let me use their phone to call my family and fed me supper. Unfortunately, my directions must have not been good because my father was unable to find me. I finally started walking again and spent the night in a field. I eventually made it to the next town (I later calculated I walked 16 miles) and a more traveled highway where someone picked me for the trip to Milledgeville. Of course, I had to 'fess up my lie to the folks and hear about how the State Patrol and other law agencies were out looking for me. It was not one of my finer moments, but it did open my eyes to the bigger world that waited for me.