It’s hard to believe we’ve reached the age where getting out of here for a few days in the winter seems like a really good idea.

We did it last year for the first time, since I had a January speaking job in Florida. We packed for January Florida weather; but our job of it exposed the fact that we would have made terrible Boy/Girl Scouts.

I froze my baguettes off. Every. Single. Day. We were only able to enjoy the beach one afternoon, and watched other people toughing it out in an effort to try to enjoy their vacations.

As an Iowa girl, I admired their grit and tenacity, while at the same time, hid the shame of my teeth chattering in 50-degree weather. What kind of an Iowa girl does that?

This year it was a non-working vacation, with the exception of the chore of securing motel rooms each night for whatever town in which we might find ourselves. I despise that job.

I sang my way across the southern and western parts of our nation as we went. It started out rough — I didn’t know a single song about Nebraska. (Do you?) From there our path allowed me to silently sing, “Wichita Lineman,” followed by the title theme from the movie, “Oklahoma!” That was followed by “Amarillo by Morning,” then “By the Time I get to Phoenix” (because it mentions Albuquerque, N.M.), and the song that makes a person get up and shake it, “Arizona.” My next destination song was, “Viva Las Vegas!” followed by “Is There Life Out There?” as we traveled through some of Utah’s desolate landscape. Montana and Idaho left no room for songs other than, “Rocky Mountain High.” And then it was on to South Dakota … and I was stuck again for a song, but not in the snow, which we encountered upon re-entry into our homeland.

We put 5,000 miles on the car like teenagers using Dad’s gas card. And while my husband may not have really wanted to come back, he decided that if he wanted to farm, he was eventually going to have to return to the Midwest, since most of the country we saw was embellished with cacti, sagebrush, tumbleweeds, mountains, and abandoned dreams.

We drove past a cemetery in Nebraska that had (near it) a mailbox with its flag up. It looked so funny, and I wondered who had something to mail from a place like that?

An Oklahoma woman made us laugh when she said (of the little towns that are so close together), “There’s another town just every little whip-stitch.” I decided on the journey that Oklahoma looked like the state that time forgot — so many little shanty-towns with overgrown everything. Yet I marveled at the oil fields with working drills, and never thought of Oklahoma as a cattle state. But we saw a lot of them there — and a much different way of raising them than we do here.

We crossed the Rio Grande River, which was completely dry where we crossed. Irrigation equipment was as common as tractors are here. Their drought is real.

We ran across some interesting names of roads in the south and southwest, including “Dead Horse Creek Road,” “Horse Thief Recreation Area,” “Bloody Basin,” “Klondike Bluff Road” (had we driven to Alaska by mistake?); “Starvation Road,” “Crazy Woman Creek Road,” and “Rattlesnake Pass.” We saw a sign for a town in Montana called, “Pray.”

We gazed at the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon, and wondered if the locals enjoyed those marvels or disliked them because there is no straight path to anywhere unless you cross the mountains. The runaway truck ramps in those mountains were sobering to see, knowing they get used now and then.

By the time we finished I was ready to be done with motel rooms and public toilets, though I admit being grateful for both along the way. Our world would be a little more “wild west” if we didn’t have either.

I’m still on my “Rocky Mountain High” and singing those songs; but it’s also good to be home. Dorothy Gayle was right.

There’s no place like home.

Karen Schwaller writes from her grain and livestock farm near Milford, Iowa. She can be reached at kjschwaller@outlook.com. Note new address.