Dad's dumb detours

After I get back from the big AirVenture at Oshkosh, I'm going to drive back East. With the kids out of the house now, and my wife planning to already be in New England for a time before I get there, I have the freedom to take what the kids used to call "Dad's dumb detours."

For the longest time, I didn't know from where I got this tendency to want to see where small roads go. Then my mother -- bless her heart -- visited Minnesota last year and we decided to drive down the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River. Somewhere around Prescott we saw a side road. "Want to see where that goes?" I said. "Sure, she answered." Light bulb!

When I was much younger, my favorite part of news on TV (that's when there actually was, you know, news on TV) was Charles Kuralt's On the Road segments. Driving where you felt like going in search of interesting people off the beaten path seemed like the world's best job.

So I'm kicking around the idea of taking the "side roads" back East. Specifically, meandering along U.S. Route 20, which stretches from Newport, Oregon to Boston, Massachusetts, with stops in Conneaut, Cooperstown, and Lenox.

And then I'm going to go for a walk in the woods of New England, and follow a stone wall to nowhere.