Road Trip

My wife and I recently took a road trip to Los Angeles to visit our kids and grandkids. The drive through Western Colorado and Utah was beautiful, but once we hit Nevada it became, to use Thomas Friedman’s popular book title, “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” The hot and flat parts are obvious but Nevada crowded? Just try driving through Las Vegas. Interstate 15 is undergoing constant construction and just outside of the city, traffic grinds to a halt. I guess it’s a warm up for driving in Los Angeles. The problem is that there is no way of avoiding Las Vegas. I’m not a big fan of the Las Vegas lifestyle anyway so we tend to just drive through. Correction, try to drive through. On the return trip I tried taking bypass freeways around Las Vega but this didn’t help much either. On a positive note, once we reached Los Angeles we had a great time with our grandkids including watching a soccer tournament, attending a birthday party, playing WII sports, swimming in the motel pool and going to a Fathers’ Day celebration. In Los Angeles as we drove around listening to a local radio station, we heard a reoccurring commercial which became the theme for our trip. This commercial advertised the “smell good plumber.” My wife and I wondered if the plumbers used special perfume, took showers before each plumbing gig, had special deodorant or what. Every time we heard mention of the “smell good plumber” we couldn’t help but smile.