“Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all…… ” Alfred Lord Tennyson For something to be forgotten, it must have once been known.

Mid century, when I was a small boy it took nine hours of arduous driving, over curvy roads, to get from my boyhood home, Harlan, Kentucky to my fathers birthplace of Louisville, Kentucky.

In the process of getting to Louisville you passed through many small towns, farming areas and places of natural beauty and historical significance.

Today with a modern highway system the same trip can be made in three and one half hours. You still pass, “near” many of the same places, however only near. At over seventy miles per hour you miss a lot.

Our ancestors who wanted to venture west did so with great peril. In the early 1800’s a trip to the west coast of the United States might have taken from nine months to a year, and in doing so, families risked their lives to make the journey.

Today I regularly fly to Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles in less than a half dozen hours. I would not like to go back to the covered wagon, but as I fly across the patchwork that is America, I often think about all the people and places that I will never experience or know because I pass so far and fast above them.

For over a hundred years our goal has been to get from point A to point B as fast and as safely as possible, not a bad goal, but travel has become all about saving time, and in the process we have missed something. As age starts to catch up with you, your body starts to slow down and in that process you begin to remember what was good about, taking time to accomplish a task.

I want to take time, at least one more time in my life, and see what I’ve been missing, flying over and speeding around America. I want to re-discover an America that has been left behind or that is just a little too far from the interstate exit.

Much of what is best about ourselves and our country lies just a little off the beaten path, come with me and let’s re-discover it together, appreciate it and understand it better. I know it will worth our time...

Bill Fortney