The Move (communications) sidebar

Traveling across country with a cellular phone is not only helpful but essential when traveling with several other vehicles. Traveling in a convoy can be a lot of fun, but unless you are a trucker and have a CB antennae four times the height of your car it’s not all that easy to communicate without cellular phones. The antennae also makes your car look like an over-sized remote control car. This is not exactly the look you are going for to attract the opposite sex...

Unless the other vehicle is in sight, it’s rather hard to tell if you are in front or behind your friends. If you speed up, you could leave your convoy far behind. If you slow down, you could be left behind. It’s a paradox easily rectified by owning a simple piece of hardware and hopefully a car charger for the extended life battery that lasts an extra five minutes than the original stock battery (a rant for another time).

This reminds me of my early days of taking two or three cars down from Michigan to Sandusky Ohio where there nearest theme park could be found, Cedar Point. They advertised the largest and fastest rollercoaster’s and never ceased to scare the life, more often lunch, out of it’s passengers.

We would often leave before sunrise to be among the first to arrive at the park. The drive was three hours and nearly 200 miles. Leaving early was necessary to beat the rush-hour traffic heading toward Detroit.

Our means of communication? Walkie Talkies. Not like the nice new ones that have 22 different channels and can go from five to twenty miles from one another, but the ones I grew up with in the 1980’s. The distance was limited to line of sight more often than not you could read the other personas lips better than you could hear them over the static.

Cellular communications have become the mainstay in communicating while traveling. Of course you must use the phones in a hands-free state when driving within most states. (public service announcement.)

I apologize for the digression and nostalgic segway as we continue our trip from Michigan to New York. I now return us to our original topic.