Your Wanderlust is Calling You

As seen in the Albuquerque Journal Rio Rancho and Westside sections 6/27/09

With summer in full swing now, vacation plans are being executed as families hit the open road in search of grand adventures, snow cones and suntans. Whether it is the biggest ball of twine, the Grand Canyon or the ambiguous "anywhere but here," it is summer and America is heeding the call of the wild blue yonder and escaping to new destinations yet unseen.

When I was young, I had a hard time falling asleep at night. Thinking music would help lull me to sleep, my mother bought me a Sony Digimatic Flip-Clock Radio for Christmas one year. This ultra-mod, state-of-the-art clock radio was white plastic, the coolest of the cool since all clock radios up until then came in black only. Four buttons on top; on/off, AM/FM, set/release, radio/alarm. The radio dial was backlit in space-age green and a soft amber-colored light lit up the black flaps with white numbers that flipped over one minute at a time. How can I recall such detail after all of these years? Because it didn't lull me to sleep. I knew every inch of that radio because I stared at it every night for years as I lay awake in bed carefully turning the dial ever so slowly in attempts to find the furthermost station in the tri-state area. It woke up the wanderlust embers that were smoldering inside of me from the bed I shared with my dog, in the bedroom I shared with my sister, in my little mid-Michigan town of Saginaw.

Wanderlust: A very strong or irresistible impulse to travel. We all have it and I think it is born within us, surfacing somewhere between adolescence and "get me out of here." Every night was like taking a trip and not knowing the destination. As the night grew longer, local stations would go off the air leaving the airwaves open for picking up the far away stations. The first time I tuned in to WJR in Detroit, albeit just two hours south of my bedroom, to me it was another world. I could hear the music the people in Detroit were hearing. I could hear commercials for local restaurants. I could hear their temperature and weather forecast for that night. Here was a bigger city for me to discover.

Soon WJR became an old friend. But when I found CKLW out of Canada, I thought I hit the big time. So what if it was Windsor, Ontario, just across the Detroit River, it was still another country for Pete's sake. Another big city I would eventually see.

My favorite discovery up until then had to have been hearing WLS in Chicago; a full 300 miles away. They had skyscrapers in Chicago, the Loop and the Sears Tower. But the coolest difference between Chicago and my bedroom? They were an hour earlier than I was. Another time zone. Score!

The greatest escape on my radio was finding WABC in New York City, 700 miles away. Talk about a big city. New York City made Detroit look like Saginaw, and I couldn't get enough. What did Broadway look like? Wall Street? Tunnels and bridges? And their summertime temperatures were so much hotter than mine. The wanderlust bug bit me hard, and I knew there was a world out there just waiting for me to discover.

If you haven't hit the road yet this summer and are in town looking for a little escape from your regular routine this weekend, head over to the New Mexico Arts and Crafts Fair at the state fairgrounds. On Saturday from 10a.m.-8 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. artists will be selling their glasswork, paintings, jewelry, sculpture, photography and much more.

Quote of the Week: "Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life." — Jack Kerouac