By Mike Pound

Globe columnist

mpound@joplinglobe.com

My wife and our 10-year-old daughter, Emma, don’t like the way I drive to Joplin.

I don’t mean that my wife and Emma don’t like the way I drive. They just don’t like the route I take when I drive to Joplin. When I drive to Joplin from our home in Carthage, I like to take a back road off Route HH.

I like taking the back way because there usually isn’t much traffic, and because it ambles through a winding, tree-lined stretch of road. Taking the back road helps me unwind before I get to work. Some people, I know, like to unwind on the way home from work. But since my job pretty much consists of screwing around for half the day, I feel it’s necessary to unwind before I get to work. (Note to my bosses at the Globe: That part about screwing around at work was just a joke. I work very hard. I just manage to hide the stress. Really.)

On my back way to work, there is a bridge over Center Creek. I like looking at the creek when I cross the bridge. I like the way the water pattern in the creek changes depending on the weather. When it rains, the water in the creek travels fast. When it doesn’t rain, the water slows down. When it really rains, like it did last week, the water travels so fast that it comes up over the road and I can’t take the back way to work for a few days.

There is a large field just off the tree-lined section of the back road to Joplin. If I’m lucky, I can spot several deer in the field. One day, on the way home, I counted 12 deer standing in the field. I think it was some sort of important deer meeting. Sometimes, I catch sight of wild turkey along the road.

That reminds me. A friend of mine once described turkey hunting to me this way: “You get up at 4 in the morning. You put on camouflage. Then you go out and find a place in the woods where turkey might show up. Then you sit down. And you don’t move. At all.”

I told my friend that turkey hunting didn’t sound like much fun to me. My friend told me I didn’t understand. I told my friend he was right.

The reason my wife and Emma don’t like my back-road route to Joplin is because they think it takes longer than their interstate-highway route to Joplin. I tell my wife and Emma that I really don’t care if my back-road way takes longer than their interstate-highway way. This baffles my wife and Emma.

My wife and Emma are normally in a hurry to get to Joplin. My wife and Emma are pretty much the opposite of “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey” people. When my wife and Emma are going someplace, they like to get there in a hurry. When I go someplace, I usually don’t even care if I get there at all.

I think folks sometimes tend to worry too much about getting somewhere and not enough about the trip. Maybe it’s an old guy thing. Maybe when you get to be my age, you don’t worry so much about getting someplace as you do about how you got there.

My wife, Emma and I are planning a trip to Chicago this summer. Rather than drive, we have decided to go by train. We decided to go to Chicago by train because we thought it would be fun. And because we figured by this summer, a gallon of gas probably will cost four bucks. The only problem, as my wife and Emma see it, is that the train trip will take about nine hours. Emma and my wife are already wondering what they will do for nine hours. I told them I plan to enjoy the ride.

“For nine hours?” they asked me.