Monday memory: bummin' around

Over time, I figured out where I got my "road less taken" wanderlust.

It was a family tradition almost every Sunday: we’d all pile into the family sedan and head down to my grandma and grandpa’s house. With “Sharon and Chet’s Polka Party” on the radio (a longtime Toledo heirloom tradition) because my dad loved to listen to it, we would take the trip through Maumee, down into Perrysburg, make the right at the main drag there and head south on that road to the sign for the high school. Then we’d make a left, cross a railroad track, make some more turns, and in a short few minutes be pulling into their driveway in Pemberville, just in time for Sunday lunch. During the summer that would be the time one of us kids would stay to spend the week at their house, but that’s a different memory.

On the way back we’d normally retrace those steps, but once in awhile my dad would take the old Plymouth Fury in a different direction. Sometimes it was to go eat at the truck stop my grandparents liked up by the turnpike exit, but in this particular case we kept going down a different road that I’d not been on. We wound our way up through seldom-visited places like Northwood and East Toledo, and I’m sure I found out why I would eventually call it “the stinky part of town” (there’s a large Sunoco oil refinery in East Toledo.)

This trip, though, was probably to see what was left of a memory. Those who grew up in a certain time in Toledo’s history (that was before my time) fondly remember an old downtown department store called Tiedtke’s. (For my local peeps, think of something like Boscov’s, but on several floors.) By this time, though, they had opened a more “modern” suburban store and finally shuttered the old downtown location a few months prior. Good thing, because there was a massive fire that burned the vacated downtown store down to its half-collapsed steel frame. That’s what my dad wanted to see, driving several miles out of his way to do rubbernecking at its finest before they cleared away all of the rubble.

For the city of Toledo, the demise of Tiedtke’s provided them the opportunity to create a riverfront park that still exists today. For me, perhaps that instilled in me the desire to break routine once in awhile and see where that road goes.

I did that a lot when I first moved down here and had nothing better to do than take my own Sunday drive just to see where roads ended up. But when I used to work a traveling retail job, I would often end up my schedule in some farflung place like Georgetown, Selbyville, or Exmore. Sure, I wanted to get home but there was either a back road I knew could take me home while avoiding the highway hassle or just a country lane that beckoned me to see where it went. So I took it, and it gave me a better picture of the Delmarva countryside - around here it’s a lot of waterman’s towns and a few hamlets losing the struggle to survive. You also find a lot of hidden gems in the most out-of-the-way places, like the ice cream stand by the barn where the cows are milked or the bridge with the million-dollar autumn view down a small lake.

Nowadays, my wife wonders how the heck I get to places. I just smile and tell her that I know some of these back roads.

And while I don’t like driving long distances as I used to, I can tell you that, to get to one of our favorite vacation destinations that we’ve been to three times now, I have taken a couple different routes to get there and a couple on the way back. The next time I may go for another route because we saw something on the way back last time that we may want to explore going out the next time. In fact, I may plan it to avoid D.C. traffic entirely if I can, because I have no idea how those people deal with that mess on the regular. (The same goes for the government there.)

If you give me the opportunity to use the road less taken, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll take you up on it.