Station Wagon, Ho!
It’s the story of a lovely lady …
We were not quite the Brady Bunch.
We were six kids and two parents but ours was an unbroken home. We were a natural
American family. And naturally, we took family vacations.
Five decades after one remarkable
journey, I’m piecing together the puzzle of temporary insanity that gripped my
parents and convinced them to cram eight people into a 5-door rolling rocket
and blast off to the west for a month. A good chunk of the summer of 1970 we spent in the family station wagon.
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| Our Chevrolet Kingswood Estate 5-Door Wagon |
I recently found the memo book my mother kept while we traversed this great nation. It is still intact. It contains mileage and expenses for a good portion of the trip. It is the picture on the front of the puzzle box. I opened the box to find that a good portion of those pieces are missing.
Only a handful of pictures from the trip have survived through years. They were first stuffed for years into a breakfront drawer. They somehow outlasted several moves and the mishandling by six children with six different levels of organizational expertise, meaning none.
The pictures were taken with a Kodak Pony 828 or a Polaroid Impulse. The colored Polaroid film that self-developed within a few minutes of snapping the photo does not hold up well over time. The black and white Kodak Pony pictures appear to have sat in their canisters well into the 1980s before being developed. Some have 1986 development dates printed on the backs of them. Most photos that can be found are as faded as our memories of this excursion.I still have both cameras my parents used on the trip and both still work.
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| Polaroid Impulse and Kodak Pony |
A few pictures and a log book don’t really tell the story. What were the reasons for the undertaking? The moon landing in 1969 could have been an instigating factor. “We choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard …” said John F. Kennedy. Neil Armstrong's one small step was still fresh on the minds of Americans in mid-1970.
A cross-country trek by novice nomads must be one of those "other things" JFK was musing about. This trip was the family equivalent of that 240,000-mile-trip to our orbital space partner. It would take logistics, physics, engineering, planning, and more planning. So we pretty much winged it.
Paper
maps and asking people were the only methods for directions. Land-line telephones and the U.S. Mail were the only means
for communication. Yikes! It is hard to imagine these days.
In early 1970 there was a national
Postal strike, most of the workers walked off the job. President
Nixon sent in the National Guard to protect some of the buildings plus sort and
deliver the mail. Nixon’s tactics didn’t work. The strike forced Congress to
give the workers a raise and reorganize the U.S. Post Office.
My father was Postmaster of a
small-town Post Office in Garwood, New Jersey. I don’t know where he fell in
that wage dispute since he was part of management at the time. He also was the
former president of the local union chapter of postal workers. He was probably
conflicted on the matter. Maybe that is one of the reasons he started looking
at his available vacation time. He decided to jump in the car with the family to
visit his sister who had moved to Arizona the year before.
The whole
country was a mess at the time. Apollo 13's oxygen tank exploded and nearly choked the whole space program. The Beatles broke up. President Nixon was expanding the Vietnam
War. Hippies were protesting. The Weathermen, a domestic terrorist group, were inciting riots and planting bombs. The National Guard was called in by an overreacting governor
working with a delirious college president and caused one of the most useless
tragedies in U.S. history by firing live bullets at college kids,
killing four, at Kent State University.
Tin
soldiers and Nixon’s coming …
Laugh-In,
Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, and Carol Burnett ruled the TV. We really
needed some lighthearted distractions from the daily chaos. There is no bigger
distraction than a road trip. So let’s go!
I had just
finished 5th grade, nearly as educated as Jethro Bodine - Beverly Hillbillies, a fine example of 1970 top 20 TV korny-copia. I can’t remember what I
was thinking about the proposed trip. All I know is, I was leaving my friends
behind to spend summer in the back of a car with my sisters, who fought to watch
the Brady Bunch over Batman re-runs, and my brothers, who teased me mercilessly
since I was the little brother. I had no concept of what lay ahead and neither
did any of my siblings.
The players:
Dad – father, age 45
Mom – mother, age 44
Eileen – child # 1, age 15
Jackie – child # 2, age 14
Tommy – child # 3, age 13
Kathie – child # 4, age 11
Bobby – child # 5, age 10 (ThatBat in training)
Patti – child # 6, age 7
The vehicle – Chevrolet Kingswood Estate Wagon, starting
mileage 19,729
The start: Garwood, New Jersey, July 17, 1970 – Friday
Day 0 – July 16, 1970 - The Chevy was loaded up on Thursday. Dad strapped a bunch of suitcases under a canvas tarp on the roof. The two back seats were laid flat and blankets smoothed out. There were no seatbelt laws. Our nine-passenger wagon was turned into a rolling Romper Room. We had the 3-person bench seat up front where my parents sat upright, and six kids in the back, cross-legged or laying down like on a kindergarten carpet. On the trip Mom would sometimes join us in the back over the need to keep the peace. "Do-Bee good kids or you’ll get the Magic Mirror against your backside!" You never saw that on the Brady Bunch.
We also had the option for
the three-row configuration – two facing front and the “back-back” facing the
rear. And, of course, the two-row standard station wagon layout. We’d switch
configurations throughout the trip depending on need.
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| Stock photos of the back-back of the Kingswood |
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| The view with the seats down - how we spent most of the trip. |
Mom had her memo book at the ready, along with a Rand McNally Road Atlas, state road maps, a AAA motel guidebook, and a ton of coins to use at payphones to call ahead to see which motels had vacancies.
Day 1 – July 17, 1970 - Long before daybreak on Friday morning, Mom rousted us all from our restless slumber and guided us to the car, some still in their pajamas. Eight sleepy souls jam-packed into the Earthly-rover embarking on a cross-country adventure.
Go West, young man! Or,
Westward, Ho! Either way, we were on our way. No cup holders, no insulated
tumblers, no cell phones, no GPS, no electronic games, no DVD movies, what were
my parents thinking?
At 4:45 a.m. we pulled from
the curb with Dad driving.
Ride Captain, ride upon your
mystery ship. On your way to a world that others might have missed …
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| Mom's log book |
Our highway trip brought us
close by Kent State University. I’d bet Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash,
and Young was playing on the A.M. station, it was making its way up the top 40.
We were finally on our own. Until we weren't.
The first stop was at the home
of Elmer K, Dad’s World War II buddy, his wife Mary, and their 5 children.
I don’t think Dad had seen Elmer since 1945 but they had kept in touch over the
years. The K's took in four of our eight as Mom & Dad and two others
stayed at the La Riviera Motel, $32.00 for two rooms for the night. The motel is gone now just
like many of our memories of the trip.
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| Garwood, NJ to Sandusky, OH - 531 miles |
Day 2 – July 18, 1970 - Saturday, we were one day
in and a bug hit the family. Car sickness? Food poisoning? 24-hour flu? We’re not sure, but
Mom, Dad, and Eileen went down. The K’s daughters took the rest of us for a swim in Lake Erie.
Wait, did I just say we went
swimming in Lake Erie? In 1970? Just a couple of months before the Cuyahoga
River, which feeds the Erie, caught fire from the pollution? They designated
Erie a dead lake. Gee, that’s good, let’s go swimming!
I could not swim then and remember one of the girls putting me on her shoulders and bringing me out into the lake. I was 10, puny, weighed in at about 55 pounds, wasn’t much of a burden. She was a teenage girl, old enough to drive, and paying attention to me. My heart went pitter-patter, boyhood crush was full-on.
Hello, Darlin' ...
But it was a short-lived infatuation stopped in its tracks by parental orders to get back in time for services.
We got back to the motel, got cleaned up, and all piled back in the wagon to go to church for 5 p.m. Mass. Even the woozy ones went to church. Alas, the bug spread to the car while we prayed for the illness to leave us humans alone.
We smelled something burning when we climbed back into the wagon at St. Mary’s Church of the queasy traveler and bailed back out when an electrical fire broke out in the wiring for the tailgate.
No fear, we called the fire department who proceeded to pour water on an electrical fire! This made many in our crew question their method. Luckily, the fire was extinguished without spreading it further. More luckily, the water wasn’t pumped in from the Cuyahoga. The car would have been engulfed like the river.
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| Postcard from La Riviera Motel My first ever motel stay. |
Dad and Mr. K fixed the tailgate
wiring while the darn bug hit me. I guess I was daydreaming about my shoulder ride and not praying hard enough. I did get to sleep in a motel for the first
time. Mom & Dad were good enough not to stick a sick child with our host
family even though I had been spreading my germs around them all day.
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| Dad and Mr. K enjoying a beer after fixing the tailgate wires |
If you’re keeping score,
that’s four ill vacationeers, plus a car fire, before we got past Ohio. Are we
having fun yet?
Day 3 – July 19, 1970 - Sunday 7:30 a.m., the wagon was all re-packed, we thanked Elmer and his family and headed west. Kathie caught the stagecoach bug on this stretch and we had to keep pulling over so she could 'feed the baby bird' on the side of the road. This was not part of the pre-planned logistics.
Five out of eight sick, that’s a bad stat for a confined space.
We all caught the same disease, we
all sang the songs of peace… Lay down, lay down…,
We wheeled forward, counting
license plates, playing board games, reading highway signs and billboards. And, of course, singing along to the radio. We
were locked in our own command capsule strapped to the top of a V-8, the
Detroit highway-equivalent of a Saturn-V rocket.
We detoured off the Interstate in South Bend, Indiana so we could see Notre Dame. Mom pointed out the gold dome as we passed through. We got right back on the highway. Dad was a lifelong Fighting Irish fan. That’s the closest he got to sending one of his kids there.
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| University of Notre Dame Dome photo from 1970 NDU Year Book |
We kept on going west through Illinois. We crossed the Mississippi at Moline/Davenport and landed a while later in Des Moines, Iowa at 5 p.m. staying in a Howard Johnson’s motel - two rooms, $36 total.
Mississippi Queen, you know what I mean …
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| Sandusky, OH to Des Moines, IA - 625 miles |
Day 4 – July 20, 1970 - We lumbered our way
through the cornfields of Iowa and wheatfields of Nebraska. In Iowa we had to pull over during
a raging Midwest thunderstorm. The rain was so hard you couldn’t see five feet.
May have been in Nebraska, the farm fields all look the same. It’s the only rain
I remember on the drive.
Everything is beautiful, in
its own way ….
We stayed on I-80 then veered south on I-80S just west of Ogallala, Nebraska into Colorado, heading toward Denver. The road previously named I-80S is now I-76. There’s some travel trivia for you.
Without our original atlas, it’s a little confusing trying to find the exact routes we traversed. There is no Google Map 1970 version. I only know that we cut south because Wyoming was not marked on my U.S. Map pencil case that I used for the remainder of grammar school. I marked our route in pen on the vinyl sack. Wyoming remains one of the few states I have not yet visited.
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| 1970 era pencil case. I had this in black but it's long gone. Do kids use pencil cases anymore? |
A little northwest of the Mile
High City, we visited Rocky Mountain National Park putting the overloaded wagon
through the test on the narrow, winding mountain passes. We settled in Boulder,
Colorado about 8:30 p.m.
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| Rocky Mountain National Park Taken near Estes, CO |
The Rockies are a spectacular site especially for first-timers. Dad was having a heck of a time concentrating on the road while it dropped a few thousand feet off to one side. The kids in the back were having holy smokes moments peering down the precipice.
We’d get stuck behind slower moving vehicles or cyclists making it feel like we were crawling. Then we’d get around them and hinder those behind us who wanted to go fast around the hairpin curves getting way too close for the kids in the back-back. These knuckleheads had no problem bumper hugging at 9000 feet while grinding through the Rocky Mountain majestic motorway. We’d pull to the right at scenic cut-outs to get the crazies off of our tailgate.
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| Rockies near Estes Park, CO 7/20/1970 |
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| Rocky Mountain National Park -7/20/1970 |
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| Des Moines, IA to Boulder, CO - 778 miles |
Day 5 – July 21, 1970 - Mountains and more
mountains - up, down, around. We headed out from Boulder headed southwest
toward Arizona, but it was slow going.
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| Near Colorado Springs - 7/21/1970 |
Long and winding road, brings
you back …
We stopped outside Salidas and took the Monarch Trail Tramway, labeled the ‘Gondola to the Sky,’ to the top of Monarch Crest and the Continental Divide.
[Mom's log says we rode the Mt. Aetna ski tow up. All these years I thought it was Pikes Peak we stood upon. On a clear day you can see Pike’s Peak from Monarch but we were not atop it nor Mt. Aetna. We were both a little off. Must have been the thin mountain air. ]
We were in our
shorts and there was snow scattered on the ground and wind blowing. At 13,000
feet in the clouds you’ve got to expect that.
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| Bobby, Eileen, Jackie, Tommy, Kathie, Patti |
We have a pictures of us standing atop the Continental Divide. Again, I was pretty sure Pikes Peak was at least in the background. A note in Mom’s log book says the next mountain is 14,275 feet - gotta be Pikes Peak right? Now, with a little research and the Gondola picture as evidence, I don’t think so.
There are about fifty-eight 14,000-footers in a 100 mile radius of Monarch Crest. The two biggest mountains in the picture are probably Aetna and Taylor. Pike’s Peak is 120 miles northeast - somewhere to the distant right in these photos.
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| Atop the Continental Divide I guess there was no one around to take a photo of us all together. |
We clambered on.
Our trip from Boulder/Denver took us
south on US25 to CO50 past Pike’s Peak and west to CO285. We did drive by
Pikes Peak and that is why it stood out in my mind. Then we hit the tramway.
I want to take you higher ...
At the end of this high and mighty day, we stopped at the Best Western
in Gunnison. The towns here were about 60 miles of mountain roads apart. We wanted to push further but there were no motels in easy
driving distance to our southwest.
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| Boulder, CO to Gunnison, CO - 275 miles |
Day 6 – July 22, 1970 - We headed south from
Gunnison leaving at 5:45 a.m. to Tempe, Arizona arriving at 9 p.m. From only 275 miles in one day to 668 the next, that’s what happens when the mountains
flatten to desert.
Catching the westbound # 9, gonna leave this town far behind …
I’m still trying to determine
the exact route taken. We hit Four Corners Monument where Colorado-New
Mexico-Utah-Arizona meet. There was a picture of our feet on the landmark. So far
that picture is lost. We must have taken CO50 to CO550 to Hwy 160 and the AZ89 through Flagstaff and south to Phoenix.
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| Gunnison, CO to Tempe, AZ - 668 miles |
And, right into the welcoming arms of our Arizona cousins.
Six days, 2,908 miles!
Days 7 – 25
My Aunt Agnes and Uncle John had moved to Tempe, Arizona in 1969. A year later they not only have
visitors but more than a houseful. I honestly don’t know how they fit us all
in.
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| Our hosts - Chris, Mark, Aunt Agnes, Sharon, Colleen |
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| Uncle John |
I can’t remember where we
slept - the floor, couches? - somehow we managed.
They had a built-in swimming
pool in the backyard, so we had that going. I learned to swim in that pool.
Uncle John walked out one day and saw we had life jackets on and ordered them
off. He simply said, "no more, learn to swim." And we did, all of us who had not
learned before.
Teach your children well …
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| I learned to swim here |
Mom failed to take notes from July 23 – August 10. What happened? The notebook must have been in the glove compartment and therefore ignored.
For eighteen days, eight bodies descended
upon our Tempe cousins. It must have felt like an invading force. Imagine
that, your brother, his wife, his six kids assault your first full summer in
your new house for nearly three weeks. These folks were saints. Saints, I tell you!
The western trip had taken its toll on the wagon. While in AZ we had the front shocks replaced plus the alternator. The car was as frazzled as its passengers.
We didn’t spend the entire 18
days in Tempe. We headed to California, to Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland. Aunt
Agnes and Uncle John were probably relieved to have us gone for a few days.
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| Tempe to Anaheim - 365 miles |
Day 15 – July 31, 1970 - According to Patti, the
California excursion was on her birthday. She remembers Snow White wishing her Happy Birthday, patting her
on the head, and her going into some Disney-induced trance. But pictures don’t lie
and Mom put the date on pictures as July 31, 1970 when we were at Disneyland. That’s
an 8-day discrepancy.
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| The Matterhorn - 7/31/1970 |
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| Mark Twain's River Cruise - 7/31/1970 |
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| Teepees along Twain's River Cruise - 7/31/1970 |
A solid memory, fused into my brain like an echo still bouncing back, over and over, and over ...
We got stuck
inside It’s A Small World when the ride broke down. It seemed like hours captive in a boat with
the dolls spinning and that inane song repeating the whole time, nearly making us
mad (nearly?). We were trapped about twenty minutes but that song still makes me
cringe to this day.
Together now,
It’s a small world after all, It’s
a small world after all, ….
AHHHHHH!!!! It’s in your head
now too, isn’t it?
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| It's a Small World ride - 7/31/1970 |
It’s a small, small world ...
The Knott’s Berry Farm pictures were either never taken or have disappeared. Disney probably had their agents break in and steal them. Can’t have any competition for your memories. But I do remember walking down the entranceway into the Knott's Berry park - the sites, the smells. Except for that darn Disney song I don't remember anything else about the Magic Kingdom.
Here’s one of Knott's flyers from 1970.
There’s 1,949 unaccounted for
miles in Mom’s log book. It’s 365 miles to Anaheim, CA from Tempe, AZ so there’s
730 miles but what about the other 1,219 miles?
My parents needed some time away from the mongrels that they brought forth on the planet so took off to Mexico one day via Tuscon. They came back with a fancy, beaded leather sombrero like the Mariachis wear and a weaved poncho. My father proudly wore both as he came into the house. They bought a bunch of plain straw sombreros for us kids. I used the sombrero and poncho for Halloween costumes for years. Right, Gringos?
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| My cousin Sharon with a souvenir sombrero |
Day 19 – August 4, 1970 - Mom & Dad, Uncle John & Aunt Agnes took a trip to Vegas and Hoover Dam without the kids for a couple of days. While Mom & Dad were away we had a babysitter. The babysitter didn't work out as she turned into a baby-lay-around-er. She lay on the couch watching TV and ordering us kids to get her stuff from the fridge. Aunt Agnes was fuming when they returned and found out the sitter didn't properly take care of us.
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| Caesar's Palace 8/4/1970 |
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| Hoover Dam 8/5/1970 |
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| Lake Meade - 8/5/1970 |
While our prodigal parents were in Vegas we had a huge thunderstorm in Tempe which was out of the norm for the Arizona summer. The AZ cousins did not take the thunderstorm well. They freaked out doing Chicken Little impersonations, The sky is falling! The sky is falling! We Jersey folk didn’t know what the big deal was. We often had nasty T-storms at home and drove through worse on the way to the Grand Canyon State.
Day 23 – August 8, 1970 - August 8 was Patti’s 8th
birthday. We celebrated at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor where they built us one of their famous 8-pound
sundaes. They brought it out on a fireman’s stretcher with sirens blaring. Patti remembers Snow White but not this? Those ain't no Disney princesses lugging that thing. The 12 of us had no problem getting through the huge dessert. We were much happier meeting this type of firemen rather than the real ones in Sandusky.
The rest of the time was spent
swimming and day tripping. We saw Camelback Mountain, Old Scottsdale, Pinnacle Peak, and various Phoenix area sites just being the tourists that we were.
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| Left to right - Aunt Agnes, Sharon, Mark (front), Jackie, Chris, Mom, Patti Bobby, Tommy (back) |
And before we knew it, it was over. Time to head east.
Day 27 - August 11, 1970 - we headed out saying our good-byes to our awesome hosts. But we weren’t leaving Arizona before seeing the big hole in the ground.
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| Tempe, AZ to Grand Canyon to Flagstaff, AZ - 331 miles |
We arrived at the Grand Canyon
at about 3:30 p.m. and drove all along the South Rim, stopping at every lookout
point and staying to watch the spectacular sunset changing the colors of the
canyon walls.
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| Grand Canyon - 8/11/1970 |
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| Grand Canyon - 8/11/1970 |
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| Grand Canyon - 8/11/1970 |
One dollar a car is what they
were charging back then, which gave you entry into Grand Canyon National Park until
the following day at noon. After sunset, we backtracked to a Flagstaff motel.
Our budget didn’t account for Canyon accommodations.
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| Ramada Inn Flagstaff Postcard |
Hiking down to the meteor was permitted in 1970. It no longer is. Dad vetoed the requests for the trek - August, Arizona desert, heat, ¼ mile down, ¼ mile up, six kids. "Sorry, but we’re going to skip this one. Albuquerque is calling." I was disappointed about not seeing the meteor up close and only getting to see small pieces at the museum at the rim. I’m more disappointed now knowing our great and good government limits access.
We continued east on I-40 and toured the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. The Painted Desert is
another fine site to see. The Petrified Forest, on the other hand, is barren
desert land with some scattered driftwood laying on the ground. The signs tell
you not to disturb the wood or rock or whatever the boring looking splinters
are. If not for those signs we would not have known we were in this so-called
forest.
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| This picture, IMHO, depicts the total amount of petrified wood in the thousands of acres in the park. |
There is nothing in between
the dual-national parks and Albuquerque unless you can consider Gallup, NM
something. We drove through Gallup seeing “Native Americans,” who
we called Indians back then, crossing the streets and strolling the sidewalks.
They looked like every other American we encountered on our trip. Everyone was
different and the same to this 10-year-old. We spent the night in a Ramada Inn in Albuquerque.
Somewhere on this day, we sat for an hour to have the back shocks in the wagon replaced. I think the desert heat was melting the springs.
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| Flagstaff, AZ to Albuquerque, NM - 395 miles |
Day 29 - August 13, 1970 - We left Albuquerque
at 6:10 a.m. and again headed east 564 miles through Amarillo, TX to the oil
rigs of Oklahoma City, including one on the Capitol building lawn. We wanted to go
further but no motels due east with vacancies.
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| Oklahoma City Capitol Building Postcard Oil derrick on lawn |
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| Albuquerque, NM to Oklahoma City, OK - 564 miles |
Day 30 – August 14,
1970 – four weeks from the beginning of this adventure.
Mom's trip log says we went straight from Oklahoma City to Dunwoody, GA, that’s 988 miles on the log. I have no definitive record of the route. I believe we went east through Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee then southeast to Atlanta. That's my best guess. Oh, how I wish I still had that pencil case.
I think my mother was driving and her co-pilot failed to write down important info I may need 51 years later. What gives? Dad was keeping log notes from lunch forward on this leg according to handwriting in the book.
We stopped for gas five times that day. Five times! That's less than 200 miles on a fill. A total of $24.52 for the day. The average price of a gallon of gas in the summer of 1970 was 36¢, which calculates to 14.5 miles to the gallon. (I did the math for you. You're welcome.) The 1960's V-8 was never known for optimum gas mileage but that's still pretty good for a loaded down wagon with wind catching luggage atop it.
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| Oklahoma City, OK to Dunwoody, GA - 988 miles |
No matter from which route we approached, we made it in a day. And once there we visited Mom’s
friends Mary H. and her family who had a few years prior relocated to the suburbs of
Atlanta.
Day 31 – August 15, 1970 - We spent August 15th
and 16th touring the Atlanta area. We visited Stone Mountain while
in Georgia and viewed the mountain carving of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis,
and Stonewall Jackson. The sculpture was incomplete at the time and a portion
had scaffolding in front. Despite current trends to tear down these historical monoliths, it is a great reminder of the trials and tribulations we
faced as a young nation and the war that needed to be fought to keep it together
and to truly make all of us free.
United we stand, divided we
fall ….
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| Stone Mountain Park 8/16/1970 |
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| Stone Mountain Tram 8/16/1970 |
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| Stone Mountain Carving 8/16/1970 |
Our host worked for Corning or some similar company and gave us a few samples of clear and colored plexiglass which was a new product of the era. Mom used one of the plexiglass blocks for a cutting board and a couple as countertop trivets. She still has them.
We visited a community pool which our host family belonged to. It was the 1st time I saw a high dive - a fifteen-foot-high board into a 13-foot-deep pool. I got yelled at by a lifeguard for hanging on the side of the pool in the deep end. The lifeguard thought I couldn’t swim but I could. I had just learned two whole weeks ago! She told me to stay in the shallow end anyway. By the end of the day I went off that fifteen-footer. It was a summer of amazing feats.
Don't it make you want to go home ...
Day 33 – Tuesday, August 18, 1970 – left Dunwoody, GA at 5:00 a.m., traveled 861 miles to Garwood, NJ, arriving home at 9:00 p.m.
We stopped at South of the Border at the North & South Carolina line and Dad picked up some fireworks which
were illegal in New Jersey. I remember the Black Cat firecrackers and
destroying plastic Army men later that summer.
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| Pedro's fireworks emporium - 1970 Picture borrowed from South of the Border website. |
It looks like Dad transposed a starting mileage figure for this day nearly making our trip 3,000 miles longer than actual. Mom corrected on the next page and totaled up the final miles.
Now it’s the time for a
showdown, let me give you the lowdown, cause we’ve come to the end of the road
…
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| Dunwoody, GA to Garwood, NJ - 861 miles |
Summer of 1970 Recap:
Swam in Lake Erie, observed the
golden dome of Notre Dame, battled Iowa T-storms, beheld Nebraska Amber Waves
of Grain, climbed the Rockies, stepped on the Four Corners, explored the
Phoenix Valley, found out It’s a Small World, learned to swim, viewed the magnificence
of the Grand Canyon, contrasted painted deserts to petrified forests, orbited a Meteor Crater, got up close to the oil industry, picnicked in the cradle
of the Civil War, blew through South of the Border, and traveled the vast U.S
Highway system from sea to shining sea.
Along the way, we laughed, we fought, we puked, we bought, we met, we hugged, we packed, we lugged, we sang, we swam, we prayed, we planned. We also found room for the unplanned, as we made our way across this American land.
Ending mileage – 27,783
Total mileage 8,054
Days - 33
The puzzle is as complete as its going to get. I've come to realize my parents were definitely - at least temporarily - insane for taking this trip. But insane in a good way, like a mad scientist who accidentally discovers a cure for disease. My parents accidentally helped us discover that cramming eight people into a station wagon for a month is not the craziest thing in the world. Close, but not the craziest. And we all survived. I'll leave it to the individuals if they're better for it. I know I am.
In 1970, Neil Young sang, "dream comfort memory to spare." This trip now lives in that realm between memory and dream. It was fused in the mind of a ten-year-old but like a painting hung in the path of the rays of light, the brushstrokes of vibrant color have dulled to pastel.
I've done my best to revive the epic jaunt, chockfull of separate and distinct escapades as different as the states we traveled through, but still feel I have come up a little short.
The bottom line is, in 33 days I crossed off more stuff from my bucket list than others get to cross off in a lifetime - at ten years old! Stuff I didn't even know I wanted to do. Now my bucket runneth over. My parents, along with many other gifts they bestowed upon us, gave us the experience of a lifetime.
In my mind I still need a place to go ...
I think it may be time for a new road trip. There's still part of this map that's unexplored.
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| The 'Station Wagon, Ho! full route - map circa 1970 |
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| The last page of Mom's log. |
You are simply amazing writer ! some memory !
ReplyDeleteThanks, Ed!
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