13 Road Trips Every Guy Must Take In His Lifetime

By Matt Bean

1. The destination-unknown weekend. Bring your girl, your wallet, and your sense of adventure, Uncharted territory is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

2. The border hop. Crossing state boundaries carries all the prosaic ceremony a tollbooth can offer. Which is to say, none. But cross into Tijuana, Mexico, from San Diego and you'll develop an appreciation for how different life can really be over the fence.

3. The one-way voyage. You leave your life behind, say goodbye to your friends, and set out into the world to find fame, fortune, or some combination of the two in a place you never thought you'd call home. They don't make a GPS for this kind of trip, You navigate by the pull of your gut,

4. The coast-to-coaster. Yes, it takes time. It takes money. But here's why it's essential: You will meet one unforgettable girt and never see her again. You will almost land in jail. And best of all, you will collect more immortal memories than you will bugs on your windshield.

5. The urban zigzag. Doesn't matter in which city: New York, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco. Just drive through it, fast, at 3 a.m. You'll feel like you own the place.

6. The European weekend. Pick one grand city: Paris, Prague, Berlin, Barcelona, Rome, London, leave Thursday. Return Monday. Pack just one small backpack. It's much harder to hate the world once you've actually seen it.

7. The grid skip. Go anywhere beyond the reach of city lights and cell towers. Preferably, it requires starting a fire from scratch, catching dinner, and not showering--things every guy should be able to do if pressed.

8. The jam session. Jerry's gone, but the nomadic, roving utopia pioneered by Deadheads can stilt be found on a minitour circuit. Fill your trunk with provisions and follow your favorite band for as long as vacation time allows. There's something pure, noble, and essential about a live-music tour in outdoor venues.

9. The long goodbye. Letting your grandfather die with dignity doesn't mean FedEx-ing flowers to his nursing home every Friday. When you care enough to give the very best, give yourself.

10. New Orleans. Because it's still there.

11. The three-ballpark trip. Try Baltimore (Camden Yards) to New York (Yankee Stadium) to Boston (Fenway Park), if you're on the East Coast; Cincinnati (Great American Ball Park) to Chicago (Wrigley Field) to St. Louis (Busch Stadium) in the Midwest; and Seattle (Safeco Field) to Oakland (McAfee Coliseum) to San Francisco (AT&T Park) on the West Coast.

12. The test track. There's something empowering about identifying a killer stretch of road, learning its nuances, and wearing grooves in the asphalt.

13. The reconciliation. Against all reason, you set out to win her back, showing up on the doorstep in her new town, new dorm, or new apartment. If you succeed, you get the girl. If you fail, at least you've teamed how strong your will can be when you're reaching for something you really want.

Seek and Ye Shall Find...

On a senior citizens bus tour, while the passengers were unloading to do some sightseeing, one elderly lady stopped and whispered in the driver's ear.
She said, "Driver, I believe that I was sexually harassed!" The driver didn't think much of her complaint, but promised he would check into it soon.

Later, that same day, as the passengers were unloading again, a second little old lady bent down and whispered in his ear, "Sir, I believe I was sexually harassed!" This time, he figured he'd better look into it.

A few passengers had remained on the bus, and he decided to go back and question them, to find out if they knew what was going on.

He found one little old man crawling along the bus floor beneath the seats and stooped down to question him. "Excuse me sir, could I help you?"

The elderly man looked up and said, "Well, sonny you sure can. I've lost my toupee and I'm trying to find it..."

The man continued, "I thought I'd located it twice, but they were parted in the middle, and mine is parted on the side!"

How to pack for vacation in 23 easy steps

By Pamela Redmond Satran

1. Make list of everything to be brought and packed. (Remember that weekend at the far-flung cottage when you discovered at 3 A.M. that you'd forgotten the extra diapers? The time you faced motel bedtime without a pacifier?)

2. Include:

- suitcase for each person, containing at least two complete changes of clothing for each day (baby gets two suitcases, four changes of clothing)

- portable crib (with two complete sets of bedding)

- suitcase for toiletries and pharmaceuticals, including special creams for all things dermal, as well as antidotes for all known pediatric poisons

- snack bag with judicious variety of kid's favorite foods, both treat-y and healthy

- stroller, bouncy seat, booster seat, car seat, other random furniture

- at least 25 books for child plus equal number of CDs, DVDs, and toys, half of them brand-new for maximum distraction value

- Nunkey

3. Note that you could forget everything else as long as you brought along Nunkey, child's smelly, torn, loved-to-pieces, once-blue-now-gray stuffed monkey.

4. Start process of corralling all goods to be packed in holding area, i.e., dining room.

5. Four nights before leaving, pack basic clothing--socks, underwear, T-shirts, extra pair of shoes.

6. Panic at being only semi-packed.

7. Calm self by remembering that all material things are transient and ultimately unimportant. Except Nunkey.

8. Enter holding area to discover child has secretly consumed all treat-y contents of snack bag.

9. Restock bag; lock in trunk of car.

10. The night before leaving, finally pack for real, laying complete outfits for each person on bed, checking off clothing for each anticipated activity or event. Swimsuits? Check. Dress for dinner out? Check. Rain gear? Check. You are so on top of this!

11. Zip, snap, buckle, tape, and lock closed all bags, and place next to front door.

12. Humming vacation-y tunes, calmly transfer contents of purse to cute new straw bag you got at that sale, remembering plane tickets, gum for the plane, even new high-SPF lip balm.

13. Tiptoe into child's room to sneak Nunkey out to suitcases, but even you and spouse together, standing on child's bed and pulling with all your might, can't wrest Nunkey from child's grip.

14. Leave Nunkey for now, but tie thick magenta ribbon tightly around wrist to remind self to get Nunkey in morning.

15. Tape note to door: Remember Nunkey!

16. Call self on cell phone and leave message: Whatever you do, don't forget Nunkey!

17. Wake up early and think of Nunkey first thing. Hah--you remembered!

18. Creep into child's room, slip monkey out of child's sweet little hands and quickly stuff into purse so he won't be forgotten.

19. Arrive, at last, at destination! All family members and bags intact and accounted for!

20. Dash to pool for quick dip, giggle tiredly together through quick dinner, sleepy stories, cheerful toothbrushing.

21. Smiling, and relaxed for the first time in a week, kiss child good night and turn off lights.

22. Deny the sound, at first, but then, stomach sinking, hear it for what it is: "Nunkey! N-u-u-u-un-keyyyy! Where's my Nunkey?"

23. Remember exactly where Nunkey is: safe in your purse. Where you tucked him. In your cute new straw bag, which you brought? No. In your purse. At home.

Chicken of the Sea

Thor Heyerdahl got it backwards. More than 40 years ago, the late explorer proposed that the Inca or their predecessors voyaged from South America to Polynesia by raft. On the contrary, a new study indicates that Polynesian seafarers reached what's now Chile by about 620 years ago. That conclusion hinges on the first evidence of when chickens arrived in the Americas.

A team led by anthropologist Alice A. Storey of the University of Auckland in New Zealand used radiocarbon dating and a comparison of ancient DNA to determine a Polynesian origin for a chicken bone previously unearthed at Chile's El Arenal site. Mitochondrial DNA extracted from the El Arenal bone contains an exact copy of a genetic sequence that appears in comparable DNA from 600-to-2,000-year-old chicken bones found in Tonga and American Samoa. Those islands lie 6,000 miles west of Chile.

Europeans arrived in South America around 500 years ago, after the Inca had incorporated chickens into religious ceremonies, according to Storey's group.

Storey and her coworkers performed radiocarbon dating on one El Arenal chicken bone selected from 50 bones recovered in 2002. The researchers then isolated a particular segment of mitochondrial DNA from the same bone and from 11 chicken bones found at pre-European archaeological sites in Polynesia. They found the same sequence in all the bones.

This stretch of DNA undergoes frequent alterations over generations. Yet the researchers found the same DNA segment in feathers of two living chickens belonging to a blue-egg-laying breed in Chile. Selective breeding may by chance have preserved the Polynesian sequence, the researchers suggest. The new findings will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The weight of scientific evidence is now squarely behind the hypothesis that it was seafaring Polynesians who sailed from the islands to South America and returned," remarks archaeologist Patrick V. Kirch of the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1989, Kirch reported that preserved sweet potatoes up to 1,000 years old, found at Polynesian archaeological sites, had originated in South America. The new evidence supports a scenario of long-distance canoe voyages by Polynesians, Kirch says. Archaeologist Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., disagrees. In her view, both a black-boned breed of chickens now found in Central America and the blue-egg variety in South America originated in Asia.

Pre-Columbian transfers of various plants, animals, and cultural traits occurred in both directions from Asia to South America, Meggers holds. The most likely sea route ran north of Hawaii and down America's Pacific coast, she says.

Moreover, the claim that the Inca possessed chickens "is historical fiction," asserts archaeologist Michael E. Moseley of the University of Florida in Gainesville. No chicken remains have been found at Inca sites, although the Spanish sometimes referred to a native duck breed as "chickens," he says.

Further work must be done to confirm the age of the El Arenal chicken bones and to establish that Polynesians regularly visited South America, Moseley adds.

By Bruce Bower