Two turns, about five weeks apart, and from the driver’s seat they were the same decision. Both were a sign on a two-lane road. Both added roughly an hour. Both were things I had never heard of. I said yes to both for the same reason, which was that I was curious and had the afternoon.
One of them is among the best afternoons I have had on the road. The other one I remember mostly as a headache and a slow drive back in bad light. I have gone over the difference more times than it probably deserves, because if there is a lesson in it I want it.
The one that worked
It was a sign for a produce stand, which is not an exciting category. I turned because it was mid-morning and I had not eaten. The stand was a folding table under a canopy in front of a farmhouse, run by a woman in her seventies who was doing a crossword and did not stop.
I bought peaches. She asked where I was headed, I told her, and she said her late husband used to drive that route for work and told me the two places worth stopping. Then a neighbor came by and the conversation turned into three people talking about a bridge that was being replaced, and I sat on a cooler and listened for close to an hour. I ate two peaches. I left with a bag of them and a piece of advice about a road that turned out to be good advice.
The one that did not
It was a sign for a historic site, which is an exciting category, and that is part of the point. It was seven miles down a gravel road that got worse in a way that made me anxious about the tires. At the end there was a gate, a plaque, and a field.
The plaque explained that a building had once stood there. The building did not still stand there. There was nothing to walk to, nothing open, no one around, and the field was just a field. I read the plaque twice trying to get my money’s worth out of it. Then I drove the seven miles back at fifteen miles an hour because of the gravel, arrived at the highway with a low-grade tension headache, and drove the rest of the afternoon in a mood.
The difference was not the destination
Here is what I want to resist, because it is the easy conclusion. It is tempting to say the lesson is that ordinary places are secretly better than official ones, that the produce stand beat the historic site because authenticity beats tourism. That is a nice story and I do not think it is true. I have had wonderful afternoons at official sites and dull ones at farm stands.
The actual difference was whether there was anything to do once I arrived. The stand had a person, a transaction, food, and a place to sit. The site had a sign to read. Reading a sign takes ninety seconds and then you are standing in a field having spent an hour to get there. Everything that made the first afternoon good happened after I stopped moving, and there was nothing at the second place to happen.
What I could have known in advance
Some of it, honestly. The gravel road was information I ignored. Seven miles of deteriorating surface is the road telling you that not many people make this trip, which sometimes means you have found something quiet and often means there is not much at the end. I noticed it at mile two and kept going because I had already committed, which is the worst reason to keep going and the most common one.
The word “site” was also information. Site, in the language of roadside signs, frequently means the location of an absence. A place where something was. I did not have that translation yet. I have it now, and it has saved me at least twice since.
The part I cannot systematize
But I want to be straight about the limits of this. The best thing about the produce stand was the neighbor showing up, and there is no version of planning that produces the neighbor. If I had gone on a different morning I would have bought peaches from a woman doing a crossword and left in four minutes, and it would have been a perfectly fine small stop that I would not remember.
So I did not make a good decision and get rewarded. I made a normal decision and got lucky, and I made another normal decision and got unlucky, and the temptation to build a philosophy out of the difference is mostly vanity. What I can control is the floor. I can avoid detours where the failure case is standing in a field, and I can favor the ones where the failure case is still a cup of coffee and somebody to talk to.
What I do with this now
Before I turn I try to picture the last ten minutes of the stop rather than the first. Not the arrival, which is always fine, but what I will be doing right before I get back in the car. If I can picture eating something, buying something, walking somewhere, or talking to someone, the odds are good. If the picture is me taking a photo and then standing there, the odds are not good, no matter how interesting the sign made it sound.
That is a low bar and it is not romantic. It also would have kept me off the gravel road, and it would not have kept me from the peaches. I will take a rule that only sorts the obvious cases, because the obvious cases are most of them, and the rest is luck that I would rather stop taking credit for.