I am contemplating a long road trip to the Front Range to attend a family funeral. It is the only time we get together these days, and worth it.

I do not want to book a flight, though, since they might put me on one of the new Dreamliners, sitting on top of the newly-enhanced battery compartment that contains, but does not prevent, sudden fires.

Nor have my junk inspected by our friends at the Transportation Security Agency.

I have enough junk to deal with as it is- some assorted family junk that came down through Raven, but probably has better provenance with the other branch of the family. So, by Panzer it is going to be, a voyage across the middle of America.

It should be a good change.

Driving methodically north and south to the farm, ferrying crap for storage while I try to sell the larger condo and downsize into a smaller one, I have been doing familiarization flights for the longer trip. I have not done the 800-miles to the Little Village by the Bay in northern Michigan in a while, but I think I can still do an extended drive.

Providing I can break it into bite-size chunks, that is.

A pal recommended the I-64/I-70 route, and if I plan a modest six hundred miles a day, then I could make Coydon, Indiana, on the Ohio River that first transported the Socotra clan down into the heartland before the Civil War.

My pal says it is a nice little town set in pretty farm country. The second day might find me somewhere near Abilene, which I vaguely recall from a War College case study as a destination where you arrive without ever having intended.

That would not be much of a change. Normally, the long drives in my life have been exercises in elapsed time, similar to the famed Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. I am deliberately going to try to break that pattern, maybe take some Blue Highways, and look around on the way.

To that end, I should be route planning, but instead I wasted a fair amount of time this morning trying to deconstruct the nature of the carnival that passes for representative government this morning.

I had an interesting discourse on this morning’s change to the national security structure, with the disastrous Mr. Tom Donolin departing and the redoubtable- or doubtable, as the case may be- Susan Rice coming in behind him.

There was also a brisk discussion of the way the Agencies have been communicating internally through clandestine email addresses in a manner calculated to avoid disclosure via the FOIA process, which we used to take fairly seriously inside the Government bunker, and stuff like that.

In the end, I decided that it is entirely possible that the Government has become so vast that the tepid Obama defense of ignorance of his own Executive Branch’s activities might actually have some validity. At Willow the other night, John-with-an-H opined that the bureaucracy is now running itself, for itself.

Old Jim, a life-long Democrat, observed that it was the first time in his time at the bar that he agreed with John.

It is only of interest to people who care about the nature of their government. I am thinking a road trip is the perfect antidote, wouldn’t you think?

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com