When my children were young, we would often launch into spontaneous nonsensical conversations.  It might be a perfectly innocent comment that became a springboard.  A wondrous adventure would unfold as we each added our own spin. We would slip into role play effortlessly, becoming princesses, elves or ogres depending upon the trigger.

We had fun pretending our way through a diversity of situations without the benefit of any props other than our imagination.

Often, I still go off of imaginative tangents.  When I’m on a road trip anything can become fodder for a rambling conversation that the casual observer would find perplexing.  Recently, heading toward the town of Stephenville I forgot the name of the next town we would pass through.  I asked my husband “Are we almost to Benjamin?”

And my husband replied no, Benjamin is the town we go through on our way to Lubbock.  Undeterred, I replied, “Well if we get to Benjamin we’ve gone too far!”  Considering Benjamin was about 6 hours beyond where we were headed, that may have been a slight understatement.

A few days later we were driving toward the airport after a long weekend and my husband said something about Timbuktu and I said or Kalamazoo, which made no sense at all.  After all Timbuktu is a city in the West African nation of Mali and Kalamazoo is a city in the state of Michigan and there was no reason to discuss either of them.  But for no reason at all it made us laugh and laughter is a wonderful thing.

Our car talk is not always so off the wall, but every road trip is an opportunity for slipping into inane conversations and we rarely pass up the opportunity.