My Sunday column: Go West middle aged man!

In the near future I am going on a vacation with an old high school buddy. My wife, the angelic Alison, has given me the OK for this “man trip,” because she is a wonderful woman — that, and she went to Cape Cod without me last summer.
I wanted to go to Cape Cod. Alison and my daughter met up with a bunch of my wife’s old college friends
They spent several days in a lovely house, comparing workout routines, eating really healthy foods and talking about recycling and how wonderful it would be when a Democrat regained the White House.
OK, maybe it was best I didn’t make that trip.
This excursion with my buddy Jim is a different creature altogether.
It is officially known as the Great Texas Adventure of 2009.
We are going to leave Dalton bright and early one morning and drive to Shreveport, La., where we will seek out a locally owned restaurant that does NOT feature nutria on the menu. The next morning we plan to visit the Bonnie and Clyde Museum in beautiful Gibsland, La. Among the museum’s many delights are weapons seized from the duo’s “death car,” old film footage of the ambush scene and the “authentic” fake movie car used in the Warren Beatty movie, “Bonnie and Clyde.
After that wallow in our nation’s history, we will then strike out for the Lone Star State. Our target is the west Texas burg of Archer City, home to Booked Up, a Texas-sized bookstore owned by my favorite author, Larry McMurtry.
McMurtry has written 40 or so books, of which I have read about 35. He’s best known for his Pulitzer Prize winner, “Lonesome Dove,” which every American should be required to read, or have read to them by someone paid with federal stimulus money.
While in Archer City we plan on taking in all the sights, or in this case, the site. That would be the legendary Dairy Queen, where over the years McMurtry has done some of his better thinking, if not dining
I would love to meet Larry McMurtry. I can see us hitting it off big, him inviting us over to stay at his house, sitting up all night talking about writing and then the next morning him offering me a multi-million dollar deal to help him pen a novel about Bonnie and Clyde.
More likely, he won’t be in town at all.
Jim and I also plan on seeing a a high school football game on that Friday night. We would love to check out the Itasca Wampus Cats. Heck, who wouldn’t? But time and distance may limit us more to the immediate Archer City area. The home team Wildcats will be on the road that week so we may have to hit the backroads to find a game. But that kind of uncertainty is just part of the Great Texas Adventure of 2009.
Our tentative game plan also calls for a jaunt down to Arlington to see the Texas Rangers — the baseball team, not the lawmen. They have a kid playing center field named Borbon I need to scout for my fantasy team next season.
Also while in that general vicinity I hope to meet up with my old pal Robert Bohler, one of two Valdostans I know of who left South Georgia for the Wild West, the other being notorious gambler-gunman-wiseguy John Henry Holliday. (You know him better as Doc.)
Planning for this trip is mostly non-existent. Not doing too much planning is part of the plan. In fact, it’s the Master Non-Plan. Of course the Chaos Theory could kick in and everything unravel. A busted axle in Throckmorton or a slung piston in Buffalo Gap would certainly muck up our Master Non-Plan.
But that’s the price you pay to be a free-ranging man’s man wandering the Wild West looking for adventures.
Well that and the long-distance charges for calling home every night to check in with the wife

Jimmy “You can call me Tex” Espy is executive editor of North Georgia Newspaper Group. Also, you can visit him at Espysoutpost.blog spot.com