Vacations Long Ago

 

Susan Vass’s Ammo Grrll column this Friday recounts a memorable vacation trip she made with her parents and siblings in 1965. She suggested others think back to their memorable vacations from their youth. When I was a kid my parents never took trips except to visit relatives. The ones I remember most are the trips we made from our home in west Texas to visit my mother’s sister in Alexandria, Virginia, probably because they were the longest. Leaving early the first day we would make it made it to my father’s sister’s house in Linden, Texas or his brother’s house in Texarkana and spent the night there. Linden and Texarkana are almost in Louisiana or Arkansas and definitely part of the south, while our home was sixty miles from New Mexico and part of the west. There were so many more trees. That first day was the easy day for driving with over half of the way in mainly empty country where the roads were not crowded, and the towns were far apart. From there the going would get slower and harder. There were no interstates. The highways were mainly crowded two lane roads that went right through the middle of the many towns along the route. It was always our hope to make it all the way from east Texas to Chattanooga in one day, but we never did. On one trip we made it in a long day to Attalla, Alabama. We stayed that night at a little motel I still remember. It was beside the highway. There was a lawn between the rooms and the highway with swings, and my brother and I played out there after dinner until it got dark. At motels my mother and brother and I stayed in the car, while my father went with the manager or desk clerk to check the room and make sure it was okay before checking in. That was common in the days before there were many chain motels. The third day usually took us to some place in southwestern Virginia, with our arriving in Arlington on the following one. On the road we mainly just drove. We didn’t stop at any of the the alligator farms, souvenir joints, or places promising to display freaks of nature such as two headed snakes along the way. We never saw Rock City despite reading invitations to do so on barns all over the place. We did stop at some places on some trips, though. One time in Chattanooga we visited a place called the Confederama which had a large relief diorama with toy soldiers and flashing lights illustrating the story of battles around the city. My brother and I thought that  was cool. Another time we visited the famous natural bridge in Virginia, but such stops were not usual. My aunt’s small house was on a couple of acres on what was then the outskirts of Alexandria. The lot was on a small hill and my brother and I had fun enacting battles as we charged up and down it. We did and saw a lot in the area around Washington on those trips. We saw the Capitol and the famous monuments. We visited Gettysburg, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and the Washington zoo. I saw the ocean. It was fun. My aunt was glad to see her sister’s family and made a fuss over us kids. My uncle did not like kids, but, like many childless men had firm notions of how to raise them and what to expect from them. I came up short, but there was nothing really unpleasant about it. My mother told us he was just a brusque northerner (he grew up New York), but I doubt that was it. The trips run together in memory. I have no records, and am not fully sure what thing happened on which trip. What is clear in my mind is that the trips were good and good for us kids, if not necessarily for my father. It is also clear that it was a different, poorer, and more backward world then in the parts of the south we drove through, and that even with the congestion on the interstates, traveling by car is much easier these days. Those trips were special and may have done something to stimulate my lifelong fondness for the open road.