Road trip provides idea for a new Doodad

By Dan Barber

My wife and I recently took a road trip to Seattle. It has been a really long time since we drove such a distance. We gave our oldest granddaughter, Haleigh, a ride up there because her new husband, Anthony, is stationed at Fort Lewis.

For someone who has been born and raised in the Mojave Desert it was a real culture shock to discover that some places rarely have blue skies with a welcoming bright morning sun to wake and warm you. Haleigh has always been adverse to change and probably because she has lived her life in a land that will kill you rather quickly if you ignore the dangers she has a healthy respect for nature.

Anthony found a real nice apartment in a small community just outside the gate… or gates of Fort Lewis. I say gates because I went through several of them when trying to leave Fort Lewis to find my way to Haleigh’s new home. Anthony and Haleigh live in Steilacoom, Washington. Because of all the fog, trees and ancient buildings Haleigh believes that danger lurks around every corner with all sorts of critters, both alive and dead, set to attack from the misty fog shrouded trees and old buildings. She recently described watching a scary looking squirrel digging a hole, and a huge deer just walking up a neighbor’s driveway. And to top all of that off the old buildings in town would make for a really good scary movie set about ghosts; and a large brick building nearby that seems to serve as a mental health facility. According to Haleigh’s research on the place indicates that this part of Washington is supposed to be the most haunted piece of real estate in the country. In the desert there aren’t too many trees blocking your view of any nearby dangers. Haleigh said that she would walk to the little town of Steilacoom, but she would have to walk along this winding road through a forest of trees to reach civilization… it’s too scary! This from a girl who can hike a desert trail dotted with rocks and scrub that could be a shady resting spot for a poisonous rattle snake!

The scary part of this trip for me was the cold fog shrouded unfamiliar roads winding through the mountains with outside temperature around 20 degrees Fahrenheit … especially when I remembered my encounters with black ice while passing over bridges in Washington state from many years before. I kept the speed to about 35 mph while fully loaded semi-trucks were zipping past me!

On the return trip we left Haleigh’s home early in the morning so I could make it past Mount Shasta’s winding roads in the daylight hours. But we hit central California after dark and exited Interstate 5 at Highway 138 toward Lancaster, which put us into the dark desert night with nothing between the Interstate and Lancaster for many miles. For the first time in my life I discovered the comfort of GPS. I sometimes made fun of people who felt the need for GPS, I used to claim that I only needed a cell phone to make and receive phone calls… I didn’t need anything to tell me where I was located on earth at any given time, I didn’t need to surf the internet, and I didn’t need to check my social media or email messages. When you are in the dark desert at night 50 miles from any kind of civilization it is a comfort to have a robotic voice tell you that you are on the right road and you only have to drive on that road for another hour or so to reach your destination! Thank goodness my wife was along with me and understood how to use a smart phone! I think I’ll ask Santa for a GPS for my truck next Christmas.

This road trip experience did give me an idea for a new app for GPS or Smart Phones… it would be a app that could pin-point the location of any state trooper, highway patrolman or police car in the country… that way speeding drivers can avoid getting a speeding ticket.  I don’t speed of course, but many others do.  An enterprising entrepreneur could also market an app for law enforcement officials to send repeating signals to speeders on those “illegal” cop detectors indicating a possible speed trap just around the next corner! That would of course slow everyone down to the posted speed with no extra patrol cars needed, and the inventor of that app could get rich. Now if you see one of these traffic ticket avoidance contraptions advertised on TV for only three easy payments of $19.99 and sold ONLY on TV you’ve read about it here first.