"Amarillo By Morning" George Strait

I just returned home from a night at the gym followed by four martinis at a local place where one of my favorite bartenders was actually sitting at the bar and not working behind it. The moral conflict between hitting on a bartender was lingering in the air and the question remains was she really a bartender tonight or just another woman sitting at the bar having a drink? I don't know.

Before she sat down I was emailing one of my best friends and talking about another trip. A year ago we did a trip from the west to the east through some of the most beautiful, open and free places in this not so free anymore country.

I came home after the bar and put this song on, loud enough that my French neighbor probably heard it, busted out the acoustic and played it a dozen times over. It is a fun song to play with an interesting chord progression and a fantastic bridge, a key change that brings it all home.

But the technical details of this simple song are not what matters at this time in the night. What matters is the run we made from Santa Fe through Amarillo all the way to Nashville in an Audi that was a few years old with myself at the helm penetrating the darkness as we made our way through the breadbasket of America.

Before we left for that stretch we had drinks at Evangelo's on San Francisco street in Santa Fe, a bar with a very long and famous history...one of those places that you only find on the road. We traversed from there to the Cadillac Ranch simply because there was a Springsteen song written about the place; waded our way through the Texas clay out towards those ten cars all of which are positioned at an angle corresponding to the Great Pyramids of Giza in the hurling northern winds whipping across the barren landscape. Had a steak at the Big Texan where we watched a man try to eat a 72 ounce steak, dinner roll and a salad in one short hour.

Out there on the road it is pure. It is everything one could ever dream it could be with a good friend and a road that goes on forever. Even so those 895 miles of Texas passed through the windshield far too soon and we were out of the promised land into Arkansas and eventually Tennessee where we had George Jones on the radio preaching about the horrors of a lost love.

Nothing compared to the time when I shot the video above. Running across the panhandle with a snooze of Copenhagen in towards some distant goal that only existed in our fantasies. There is no end point and there is no goal. Like Homer before us it is the journey that is the point and not the destination. You don't have to get existential or metaphysical about it, you just have to do it and get your ass out there and see what the road has for you in store. A man that is free...there's nothing more noble and I promise you the ride it won't disappoint.