Road Trips

I will be driving for 12 hours tomorrow.  The only really great road trips are on motorcycles or in convertibles.  Since I will be driving in neither, the chances of greatness are statistically insignificant.
Like all possibly ok road trips this one has something very bizarre at the end and like all 12 hour road trips on modern roads it will involve great distances.
I swam 3000 yards today since tomorrow will be a time of great sitting.  However, at the end of the road trip I have been proposed a most interesting swim which I will endeavor to savor over the long hours of almost nothing.
Since I cannot expect to contemplate for 12 hours, I have an audio book on the renaissance to keep me company and something a little earthier if that gets too deep.  And at the end of all of this I will not have a car which is a peculiar thing about this possibly ok road trip, but that is more of the beginning of options than the end of transportation.
There will be quite a bit of latitude, but that doesn't translate into freedom.  There is the freedom of the road which is no freedom at all if you have a destination and a time frame.  But I am luckier than many for while this is a long road with a very strange ending, afterwards, my life opens up more than most people who are not dying immediately.
This has been a week of great death among my peers and near death.  One has died, one's parent died.  Another stands to get open heart surgery.  While the funerals are being planned and perhaps carried out, while the surgeries are being prepped and the problems mulled, I will be driving down the road, the scenery changing, the temperatures falling, the future stretching out before me and the past in the rear view window.