Road Warriors

I made a 600 mile loop on the road today, but that's nothing. My top run is just over 902 miles. Yes, in one day. And my goal is to trip a thousand. But even I'm sure that total has been surpassed by my dad or my grandfather. Likely by both.

We're drivers, we Detroit Cosgriffs anyway. I come by my affliction honestly. Pops and Grandpa Joe loved to be on the road.

Joe liked to go on the road to wherever it led him. He would simply take off, go out west, say, riding the rails in his younger days, or to Mexico by car. Maybe Alaska even, or up the 401 through Ontario with my brother Phil until they ended up in Quebec where neither understood the language and ate boot tongues with cheese sauce. Je ne sais quoi. Joe had many interesting things happen to him that way. Some will certainly be blog fodder as I recall them.

Pops, he traveled mostly for business. But man did he travel. The folks at Electric Eel, the company dad sold for and I do now, called him the Road Warrior. Damn Mad Max. Pops had him beat by many untold miles, traversing these United States and even Canada for the business, for Electric Eel. He loved the road, and the road, him.

I'm retreading many of those miles now. And I'm gaining a deeper understanding every day of my forebears' love of the open road. There's a freedom to it, an openness you rarely find elsewhere. I flatter myself that I'm anywhere near the men they were. Yet every now and then I hear their voices through mine.

After making a delivery this afternoon, after offering tips and answering questions about the unit I had delivered, one young man was astounded that I was returning to Detroit this very afternoon. "You're going back to Detroit today?", he asked incredulously.

"Hell, yeah,' I told him. "You think we still travel by stagecoach?"