Memory Road Trip

Of my most vivid, positive memories of growing up the only daughter and middle (favorite) child of John & Luella, our weeks-long, summer road trips are among my favorites.  Granted, I'm not sure I thought so at the time. My father didn't meet a roadside historical marker he didn't want to stop to see. My mother wouldn't let my father pass a greasy, local diner where she might find a reputable BLT or piece of cherry pie. (This picture is from one of those trips, but none of my folks' slides -- which I recently had digitized -- were dated or marked in any helpful way, so I have no recollection of where we might be.)

These were the days before straight-jacket-styled car seats and booster seats, so my two brothers and I were free to annoy one another in the back seat of our purple-ish Ford LTD (complete with "UffDa" license plates and stickers in the back window of every state we'd visited). Lines were drawn dividing the back seat into three parts, but, with a brother younger than me by nearly eight years, difficult to enforce. We enjoyed the requisite road trip games, including trying to spot license plates from the most 'foreign' state, or, even, crazy as it seemed then, from a province of Canada. Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall was sung. A lot. (And no one thought it might be inappropriate at the time.) No hand-held computer games, no cell phones, no I-Pods. Not even much radio, considering all of our trips started in Chicago and ventured west. Lots of dead air there. 

Central Kansas was always on the route, given that's where my father's family was. North Dakota was usually on the itinerary, to visit with the few members of my mother's family. In between these requisite family visits we saw the Badlands, the Rockies, Yellowstone, Mt. Rushmore. I didn't appreciate any of it at the time (just being honest here), but I do now.

What I do remember valuing was staying at various Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons, where we would eat puffed Cheetos and drink root beer poolside with my Dad. My mother didn't like the water. She'd spent too much time, and money, on her hair to want to ruin it. But my Dad was all about the end-of-the-day swim with my brothers and me. Like most dads of that era, he spent a lot of time at work and not a lot of time doing dad things, non-disciplining dad things, that is. 

Monday would have been his 78th birthday, if he hadn't died too soon at 69. I'm not terribly sentimental, but I am very sorry my sons didn't know him. And I do miss him.

So, to John R., cheers.