Shootin' it Straight - Close to Home (FREE ACCESS)

Earlier in my illustrious career as a truck driver for a major company, I was either forced or had the opportunity (depending on perspective) to travel the nation from corner to corner. After achieving the status of "steering wheel holder" for a number of years, I was promoted to training engineer. While that sounds glorious, it essentially means you’re now paid slightly more to place your life in the hands of a stranger while teaching them to pilot 80,000 pounds across the Rockies.

The moral of this yarn is: I’ve traveled a decent amount. I’ve seen a few things. I’ve experienced bits and pieces of many regions of our great nation.

None of it is home.

Eating questionable Hispanic food from equally questionable folks selling out of the trunk of a Honda Accord just across the border south of Laredo was really, really good. I’ll admit, the wife and I have also ridden the motorcycle from home to random Mexican restaurants with plywood signs that matched up just as well.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, deep in winter, left me in awe, standing on the shoreline, leaning into the bitter wind. I’d also rank turning the bend into the “doorknob” while floating Buck Creek as breathtaking, and that’s just a few dollars in gas from home.

The Kansas farms and fields are impressive in their own right, just by sheer size, but my neighbor Bub regularly has a garden that could make the cover of a magazine.

Texas has a couple of little smokehouses that serve brisket so good it’ll make you drool on yourself and grow a handlebar mustache. But there’s a smoker out back and a firepit at my little knob abode that comes pretty close.

I’ve eaten every version I could find of biscuits and gravy from sea to shining sea. Each place advertises the best, usually served with some specialty bacon, to the great dismay of my arteries, I’ll add. But no flapjack house or diner beats big ol’ biscuits in a cast-iron skillet on my own table, with a side of Indian Creek’s finest bacon.

Between work and personal trips, I’ve done my share of roaming. I thoroughly enjoy seeing new places and trying new things. I’ll seek it out till the bitter end.

But nothing I’ve experienced takes the place of home.

Lying in a hammock out back, listening to the fire crackle, or, if I’m being a little less poetic, hearing a CR Honda rip as the power valve kicks in. I’ll take a quiet home-cooked meal over any bustling hotspot. Beach sunsets are beautiful, but they’re matched by the color show painted across the sky at the end of a day in Eastern Kentucky.

This porch swing, built for a hundred bucks and held up by twenty dollars' worth of chain, is worth more than all of Manhattan when I sit on it and look out over a farm that’s been turned by three generations (and counting) of family.

Nothing comes close to home.