Making long road trips easier

The older I get the less tolerance I have for crappy conditions, one of which is driving for hours on end. Our last such drive took three days - each way.

Easing the physical pain was one of those butt cushions with a hole in the middle - made, I think, for folks with medical problems back there. Though I have no such problems, neither do I have sufficient padding where I need it for long sitting experiences, so the cushion helps a lot.

Also offering physical relief is frequent repositioning of the car seat, both the bottom and the back rest. Just the change of putting one’s weight on different places and at different angles helps me.

But what helps most is Scott Joplin. Incredible as it sounds, during that three-day bore-a-thon we listened to the 18 or so tracks on a Scott Joplin CD, over and over. It never got old and his rag-time music is so expertly syncopated, so varied, and so intricate that it seemed always new, always magnetic.

We played other music too, but Joplin was the only who could lift me from a bored driver’s funk.