The Road Trip From Hell: A Glowing Itinerary
Every summer, millions of families from all across this land pack for and launch themselves on that epic known as the Great American Family Vacation. Whether this is even voluntary is open to debate, or perhaps it is more akin to the swallows who must return to San Juan Capistrano every year, or perhaps the reenactment of some ancient journey such as that undertaken by nomadic tribes crossing the Bering Strait to escape the white death of another ice age?
A mystery that will never be fully fathomed, the road trop seems designed more to tear families asunder than to bond and have fun as a unit, and yet, every year,vValiant suburban and urban families pack their belongings, stuff the kids into the back seat, prepare their navigational aids and snacks and head off into the unknown.
And what destinations are the most popular? Amusement parks? Sure. National and state forests and wilderness preserves? Of course. Cultural attractions? Historic places? All these and more. There are culinary road trips, gravestone rubbing trips, trips to shop and trips to visit distant and unloved but moneyed relatives that must be appeased.
How about a trip to Hell? That is, a trip to some of the great sites of the Cold War, places that are, for the most part, forgotten but critical in that long and unloved conflict of the recent bad past. In your wildest nightmares, you may not have envisioned some of the places that you can go that you don’t even have to pay a cent to get into, and nore will you have to worry about crowds of badly dressed, smelly fellow tourists that your prefere to distance yourselves from anyway. You will, however, have a lot of explaining to do when you bring your friends over for the end-of-trip slideshow and martini party, but if you’re reading this, you're probably odd enough already to not mind weird looks.
Let’s begin then! Not only will we visit places in the US, but we’ll zip around the world - but only if you’re very good and stay quiet when the tour guide waxes poetical, Some of those places are damp and uncomfortable (and haggis lurks at one of them), while others in the Pacific areas might just get you deader than one of those 1950s radiation experiments. But, for the sake of history, it’s worth a little risk, don’t you think?
Destination: Green Valley, Arizona’s Titan II Missile Museum. Arizona is a land of harsh deserts, of frontier gunslingers and border wars, a place that echoes with the cries of the US Cavalry battling (and usually losing badly) the Apache tribes who moved like ghosts among the dry river beds and towering mesas. It’s the land of gold strikes and Wyatt Earp, and it’s also a place where part of our national defense was once carried out. The Titan II Missile Museum is really pretty interesting, and worth checking out. The Titan, as you remember from your 5th-grade history master class, was one of the more pricey components of our Cold War nuclear umbrella, and this museum is an excellent way to see how tax money was spent and how one of these immensely powerful weapons was serviced and kept ready for the unthinkable (when the balloon goes up is one of the more inane ways of putting it). The deactivaed 103-foot missile is still waiting in the deeps of it's silo, and perhaps the best part is that they show you the old double key arming sequence as part of the tour you get here. Finally, some scenes from Star Trek: First Contact were filmed at this site. The web site is http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/A...
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