Collages: Simone Tieber

7 Tried and True Travel Tips from Willie Nelson By Robert Huber If anybody knows the road, it's Willie Nelson.

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As he once remarked to Bill Wittliff, a Texas buddy and movie producer who worked with Willie on Honeysuckle Rose and Red Headed Stranger, "I like to ride on a bus or in a car. I like to jog and walk. I like to fly. And when I'm not moving, I like to play music."

• Hitching a Ride with Willie Nelson

• Willie Nelson's Take on…

• Back to the Story

As a kid, Willie would hop freights or hitchhike to anywhere just to be on the move, and for a while, many years later, he zipped around in his own jet. But Willie's preferred mode of transportation the past few decades has been Honeysuckle Rose, his bus. In fact it's Honeysuckle Rose III now, to the collective tune of a few million miles; it's really, more than anywhere, his home.

Here are his 7 fundamental rules of the road:

1. Turn your vehicle into a refuge—not just a functional form of transportation. It should be a place where down time is comfortable (hint: try living in it before you hit the road). The back of Willie's bus has a huge bed and a TV and guitars and a killer sound system, but what really stands out are the Native American paintings and the beaded necklaces, breastplates, and feathers that create a curtain around the bed, closing him in. "My bus is like a cocoon," he wrote in his autobiography. "I can be close enough to the so-called real world that I could reach out and touch it, yet I can be as quiet and alone as I wish."
2. Compatibility is more important on the road than romance. Whoever you travel with, you'll be spending a lot of time with them. Willie is famous for his life on the road breaking up several marriages (his own, mostly); but it's also the case that his entire band has been with him more than three decades and counting. "I've known him since 1955," his best friend, drummer Paul English, reminisced before a concert in New Hampshire last winter. "I started with him in 1966, been with him ever since, and we've never had a cross word. Isn't that amazing?"
   (By the way, Willie even seems to have figured out the marriage thing. Wife #4, Annie, stays in Maui with their two teenage sons. Willie gets there when he can, and that's more or less okay with everybody. "She's about as independent as I am," Willie says. "And she's very tolerant of me being on the road. We allow each other to be ourselves—and I like having a home to go home to.")
3. Celebrate the ordinary. Sure, part of traveling is taking in views like the one Willie describes in The Facts of Life and Other Dirty Jokes, his best-selling travel journal, as he heads to Salt Lake City: "I could see patches of blue snow in the fields. Crowns of snow looked like starched white nurse caps—like most musicians, I owe my life to nurses and waitresses—and the jagged rocks turned purple in the rising sun." Breathtaking.
   But Willie's a master at enjoying small-town life, Waffle House and Denny's restaurants, and cornfields. There's lots of that stuff on the road, so you'd better enjoy it all.
4. Have plenty of diversions. On the road, Willie plays chess, dominoes, computer golf, reads the daily paper, watches Westerns, writes music, sleeps, practices Tae Kwon Do—he's a black belt, and for a while he was fond of kicking his microphone off its chin-level perch at shows—listens to lectures on the creative imagination by Father A.A. Taliaferro of St. Alcuin's Church in Dallas, and encourages his roadies to tell him bad jokes that can't be repeated here. "I don't have any problem finding things to do," Willie says.
5. Have a hobby that requires random stops (and that has nothing to do with being on the road in the first place). For Willie, it's golf—he's hopelessly addicted. Willie used to call it "chasing a little white pebble around a cow pasture." Then he went out with Paul one day. Willie took five swings before he even hit it, and by the 3rd hole it was raining. "Want to call it quits?" Paul asked. "No!" That fast, Willie was hooked, and now most of the band plays.
6. Listen. For what? Whatever's calling you. "When my mind is open and receptive," Willie once said, "it will pick up radio waves from somewhere in the universe, and a song will start. A line, a phrase. You don't call up creativity; it's just there." Back in the late '50s, the 30-mile roundtrip from Willie's apartment to the Esquire Club just outside of Houston, where he was playing in a band, produced "Night Life." Okay, so you're not Willie Nelson—but his point is really opening yourself to possibility, and hitting the highway is a great way.
7. Know when to go home. Even for Willie, being on the road eventually reaches a point where it's more chore than rejuvenator. "There are times," he wrote, "when so much energy has built up over a long road trip and the glands are pumping so much juice that even a 2,000-mile ride on Honeysuckle Rose won't bring me back to earth. When I feel this happening, I know I must go home."