This past summer, our RV excursion took us along myriad small town Main Streets and rural highways brimming with establishments attempting to lure passersby. Here follows a list of my favorite names of various types of businesses:

Toy store: The Tiny Acorn (Waterbury, VT)

Gift shop: Maine-ly Maine (Ellsworth, ME)

Wood-themed gift shop: Once A Tree (Camden, ME)

Handcrafted furniture store: Good With Wood (Pellston, MI)

Imported furniture store: Far Fetched (E. Hanover, NJ)

Landscape designer: Garden of Eagen (New Castle, PA)

Theater: Headless Sullivan Theater (Geneva, NY)

Tavern:
1.      Johnny Bravo’s Tavern (Rome, NY)
2.      Two-Bit Tavern (south of Butler, PA)

Bowling alley: Bowl Winkles (Lake Placid, NY)

Motel: Stumble Inn (White Lake, NY)

Cheese shop: Yancey’s Fancy (near Batavia, NY)

Ice cream shop: Sunny Daes Ice Cream (Fairfield, CT)

Beer and wine supply store: My Old Kentucky Home Brew (Louisville, KY)

Hair salon:
1. Bee’s Hive of Beauty (New Rochelle, NY)
2. Head Turners Hair Salon (Thomaston, ME)
3. Back to Your Roots Hair Salon (Boonsboro, MD)

Manicurist: Gossip Nail Studios (N. Providence, RI)

Laundromat: Bear in a Tub (Inlet, NY)

Daycare: Piggyback Rides & Slippery Slides (Bristol, NH)

Car wash: Carcuzzi (Saranac Lake, NY)

Farm: Pooh Corner Farm (near Bethel, ME)

Shopping Center: The Old Bag Factory (Goshen, IN)

State park: Sleeping Giant State Park (CT)

Book store:
1. Present Tense (in Batavia, NY)
2. Bearly Used Books (Enfield, NH)
3. The Alphabet Garden (Cheshire, CT)
 
Fly shop: Tie By Night (South Hero, VT)

Bait store: Happy Hooker (Carroll Township, OH)

We’re in the midst of a tour of New England. Having made our way through Maine and Massachusetts, we’re now at an excellent campground in Mystic, Connecticut, surrounded by families partaking in the two swimming pools and the jumping pillow and the hayride and the playground and the banana bikes and the basketball court and the game room and the ice cream sundaes and the tie-dying.

It was a hot day today, spent primarily poolside. But I want to talk about frost – as in Robert Frost. The poet, who made his home in New England, is most famous for his poem “The Road Not Taken.” It ends with this famous stanza:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

There are some who interpret it as an expression of regret. I prefer to read it with a positive spin – as a boast about an avenue well-chosen. So I’d like to offer a personal tale from New England as a case in point.

Just over a week ago (it was June 17, to be exact), we had a choice in Vermont. We were making our way from the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory to a campground in the little hamlet of Quechee. The easy route would have been to take I-89 straight there, perhaps a one-hour drive. But the other option was to explore Highway 100, which slices down the center of the state. We asked a man at the factory – an abnormally tall fellow who had been our tour guide – which one he would suggest. And he put it thusly: “Well, the interstate has the grand vistas, but the blue highways offer the little vignettes.”

In Vermont, at least, that’s a perfect description. I-89 is unusually scenic, but the back roads – well, they’re something special. With the sun beginning to fall toward the magic hour, we really had no choice. A sunset cruise down a Vermont back road was too tempting. We opted for the long way there.

Our GPS wasn’t happy about it. “Recalculating,” the voice kept saying, over and over for dozens of miles, trying to get us to make our way back to the interstate, sounding just that much more ticked off every time she said it. Indeed, the drive down Highway 100 (also called the 43rd Infantry Division Memorial Highway) added more than an hour to our journey.

But here’s what the road less traveled gave us:

In Waterbury, a farmers’ market and a toy store called The Tiny Acorn. In Waitsfield, Misfits Farm and 1824 House Restaurant & Inn and a herd of solar panels amid fallow fields. In Granville, a glassblower’s studio and a white-steepled church and American flags waving from telephone poles all the way through town.

In Hancock, D’s Doghouse Tavern and Sunshine Valley Berry Farm and the 204-year-old Hancock Village School. In Rochester, an old-fashioned soda fountain and the Pumpkin Patch B&B. In Pittsfield, a sheep pasture and a yoga studio. In Killington (“Heart of the Green Mountains”), Bill’s Country Store and Hemingway’s Restaurant.

All the while, the whim of the road and the direction of the sun kept changing the pavement from shadow to light. And rivers and creeks shadowed us throughout, switching sides of the highway periodically, like a little puppy trailing its best pal.

By the time we veered eastward on Highway 4 through Woodstock – easily one of the most scenic and charming towns in America, with the flowers lining Main Street and the covered bridges and the local cemetery on the hill that looks like something Norman Rockwell might have painted on Halloween – we were certain that we had made the right choice when the two roads diverged.

Made all the difference.

I saw a bumper sticker yesterday, here in the environs best described as my old stomping grounds: “Ithaca: 10 square miles surrounded by reality.” The implication is that this city in central New York is so quirky that it veers into the surreal – and, having schooled here for four years and worked here for another two, I can attest to the validity of that to some extent. Here, people also sport bumper stickers saying “My karma ran over my dogma.” And they had a longtime socialist mayor. It’s that kind of place, and I love it.

But that original bumper sticker could really describe the past few days that I’ve spent here – at my 20th college reunion at Cornell University. For me – and for the hundreds of other alumni from the classes of ’05, ’00, ’95, ’90 etc. – it was a respite from the reality of our current existence.

Amy and I excitedly showed our boys around campus – the clock tower, the football stadium, the slope up the hill to the Arts Quad, the 19th-century buildings where we took classes in writing or civil liberties or psychology. You know, stereotypical college stuff. The kids humored us, I suppose. But really, the tour was for Amy and me. A return to a locale that was the scene of an intense and incredible time of our lives, and a reunion with many of the people who were so integral to that period – well, it’s as if the RV that took us here was a time machine.

The temptation, of course, is to make an analogy to our road trip, to say that our annual summer-long RV journeys also constitute journeys away from reality and into the fantastic. But actually, it’s much the opposite.

I contend that our summer road trips are actually excursions into reality. We have a wonderful home life in California. Great friends. Charming town. Fine house. Relatively serene existence. But it’s still a bit of a bubble. It is the real world, of course, but it is a small world. Our attentions are largely limited to day-to-day concerns, a local perspective, our own subculture. The same pretty much goes for anyone, regardless of where you live.

But when we hit the road in a house on wheels, we visit with the rest of the world, various subcultures, diverse scenery, people with whom we would never have had contact had we not parked next to them in some random campground in northern Ohio or stood next to them on a boat tour of Niagara Falls or chatted amiably with them while strolling through a children’s museum in upstate New York or bantered with them at a diner in Indiana.

This summer, we’re going to be driving through rural New Hampshire and central Kentucky and suburban Connecticut and the outback of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The people, the lifestyles, the environment – in those places, each is distinct and vastly different not only from each other but also from the experience we have at home ten months out of the year.

By temporarily leaving our bubble of limited reality, we are enlightened about the countless realities out there. We can appreciate the myriad American options. And then we can return with a better understanding of our own lives.