On the Road - Family

Interstates

There are many reasons to like the 1962 version of Lolita with Sue Lyons but the reason I like it may be unusual -- I love the second unit  (or possibly stock footage) of roadside America before the Interstates.  This is the America I vaguely recall from the summer trips we took every year between Boulder and Louisville to visit the grandparents.  Aside from a few toll roads like the one between Boulder and Denver and the one in Kansas where we caught my mother pushing her V8 Chevy to 90 mph, the roads we traveled were two lane. Between Denver and Kansas City there was very little Roadside Americana to see -- just miles of sun baked asphalt or concrete running through flat wheat fields that stretched to the horizon. In Missouri the terrain started getting greener and more interesting but that meant hills and the two lane road had to go up and down every little hill with the trucks straining and cars piling up behind them. And now it wasn’t just hot but also humid. By St Louis it was like creeping through hell. Then the final push through southern Indiana (truly lovely country) before finally crossing the bridge over the Ohio River into Louisville.

As the years passed this trip got more frustrating as construction of the Interstates progressed. Toward the end it seemed like we spent half the time creeping down two lane, truck choked roads watching the heavy equipment working on the new super highways. Sometimes the asphalt would be down and the stripes painted and the new, glorious road lay just out of reach, taunting us. Or we would be allowed on for a couple miles until diverted for a bridge or overpass that was still under construction. By the time these Interstates were finished we had moved on to California.

The Science of Travel + The Adventure of Pretty Boy

We always traveled a lot as a family. Besides the trips back to Louisville, there were holiday trips to Estes Park, and longer trips with my dad when, during school vacations, we (or just I) would accompany him on his sales trips. We had packing for these car trips down to a science: There was always a big, ice filled cooler...

This looks like it could be ours.

...full of Cokes and perishable food; a picnic basket with more food; and then several suitcases. I always had the back seat to myself and would have a number of books for reference. 

I liked everything about road trips: staying at motels with pools; eating out (see my mother's cooking); seeing the country. I even enjoyed helping my dad set-up and stock shelves of paint in warehouses or PXs. The only time I've been to Aspen was in the early '60s when we went there to call on the hardware/paint store downtown. Back then Aspen was so sleepy the hardware store also handled caskets and the owner bred dachshunds. When we were there they had a litter of puppies running around the store and out into the street. Apparently everyone knew to drive carefully there because of the puppies.

Often we would also have a dog or even the bird in a little cage hanging from the coat hanger hook. One hot summer, an hour or so south of Cheyenne Wyoming, the bird managed to escape his cage and fly out the open window. We pulled over and it was easy enough to spot this tiny bright green parakeet circling in the pale blue sky that stretched off in every direction to the featureless horizon. My dad followed Pretty Boy (I hope I didn’t come up with that name) and eventually scooped him up as he sat, panting, on a fence post maybe 20 yards from the road. He barely made another peep the rest of the way home.

As for seeing the country, I was so surprised to discover, when we were living in the San Fernando Valley, that many of my schoolmates had never even been over the hill into L.A. proper. I would be describing UCLA and the beach at Santa Monica to people who had been born only a few miles from these places but had never seen them.

Yellowstone

We also visited Yellowstone National Park while we lived in Colorado. We stayed at the Old Faithful Lodge, a charming old place...

... but, to save money, we ate many of our meals in campgrounds while we were driving around the park. This was in the days before they chased the bears away from tourist areas, so breakfast was often interrupted by a visit by curious bear cubs or their overbearing mothers.

The view from our Ford.

Cross-country Road Trip During College

July 1971 I took a cross country road trip with my parents to visit the Minnesota Cousins (and aunt and uncle). This was the first trip I’d taken across America as a vegetarian (and a driver). Up to this point I had been a vegan (for a year), though I don’t recall using that term. But by the time we hit Oklahoma I realized that I was going to have to add eggs and cheese to my diet. We would be eating in some diner near our motel and I would have half a dozen side dish plates in front of me as there were no main dishes I could eat. You can always get an omelet. Plus, it keeps the chickens in business. (Isaac Bashevis Singer was once asked if he was a vegetarian for his health and famously responded, "I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.")

This was also when I discovered one advantage of being an adult... or at least a licensed driver. I happened to be driving when we hit Des Moines, Iowa and were having trouble finding a place to stay. As my parents argued I finally just drove back onto the Interstate and headed for Ames where we did actually find a room. I think this may have also been when I learned that the secret to traveling as a vegetarian is only stopping in university towns.

On the way back to Arizona we visited Colorado for the first time since we left in 1964. We parked in front of our old house just to look around and see how things had changed/remained the same. We were only there for a few minutes but one of my childhood friends came up to say hello... I had no recollection of him but he remembered me. Maybe it's because I've moved so often (and switched jobs so frequently) -- or maybe I just have a memory like a sieve -- but I'm terrible about remembering people. 

We drove up into the Rockies from Denver. I think we stopped once at Vale just to look around at how it had changed beyond recognition. (The only other time I had seen it was the year it opened when it was mostly a construction site and looked like a mess. Buying property there seemed insane to all of us.) On the road to Leadville we drove through a little storm, the high point of which was a dramatic double rainbow that appeared to arch just over the roadway. If there had been pots of gold we could have reached them from the car. 

At Leadville I jumped out of the car and ran up a flight of steps to get a better angle for a photograph... and nearly passed out. Denver is famous for being the Mile High City, but Leadville is almost twice as high.

Somehow, I convinced my parents to drop me off in Leadville where I camped for several days before hitchhiking back to Arizona. (See: On the Road - Colorado)

Last Road Trip With the Parents

The summer after my sophomore year (1972) I traveled a lot. The first trip was a road trip with my parents to California that would turn out to have lasting consequences. While we had lived in Southern California for several years we had never really traveled north of Santa Maria (aside from the football fiasco). So this summer we did the grand loop of central and northern California, and the bottom of Oregon, hitting Yosemite, Crater Lake, and Redwood National Parks and then driving down the coast with stops in San Francisco, Carmel, and even Sunset State Beach on Monterey Bay. I got lots of great pictures (but was really deflated by catching an exhibit of the photography of Edward Weston in a little gallery at Carmel. I was blown away by his work -- and especially by the look of images printed from view camera negatives. Any illusions I had about the quality of my own photography shriveled up and died).

The most beautiful country we saw on this trip was the redwood forests up by the Oregon border -- where I have never returned, strangely enough. Redwood National Park is out of the way, but, in my opinion, way prettier than Yosemite or any of the other parks I've visited. I’ll write more about the San Francisco visit later, but I was also impressed by the Carmel Mission and garden.

Me and my dad below the bells.

My photo.

A more conventional shot.

For some reason, the Carmel Mission doesn’t have the status of many of the other missions, and it is small, but the garden is absolutely stunning. We just happened to hit the Mozart Festival so one night I was at the mission with hundreds of people on a mild summer night listening to the music of Mozart emanating from this old and handsome Spanish mission church. And walking back downtown to the motel where I was staying with my parents, I was persistently cruised by some older man who I eventually lost.

Final Family Trips

As my parents got older they would occasionally visit me in California in the summer to get out of the Arizona heat. Neither of my parents were very mobile anymore, so my job was to devise trips that were not too far afield and didn’t require much walking. Ideally, we would just go somewhere nice and enjoy the place. Actually, that is my preferred method of travel anyway, though I somehow end up doing an inordinate amount of walking. 

Point Reyes Station, on Tomales Bay, is one of the most beautiful places I know of anywhere, so I brought my parents there to stay at a B&B that was really just a quirky little house (next door to the owner’s residence) in a stunning location. Aside from car trips to local restaurants and scenic spots -- and a hilariously ill fated trip to see the lovely lighthouse on the ocean side of Point Reyes on a day that was so foggy we could see nothing beyond the parking lot. We could hear the surf but had to buy a postcard to get any idea of what the area looked like. Otherwise, we hung around the comfortable house with my parents enjoying its not being hotter than hell.

View out the windows.

Back to Monterey

Another visit began inauspiciously with my mother coming down with a nasty stomach flu. I had booked them in a nice place on one of the few flat streets in SF with a variety of restaurants within a block of the motel door. But my mother was too sick to leave the room and it turned out my dad could only walk half a block before he had to stop because of poor circulation in his leg. Finally, my mother was feeling better so we set off for the planned high-point of this trip, a visit to Monterey. Again, I reserved a room in a nice hotel overlooking the Bay where we could sit on the little deck and watch sea otter families cavorting in the kelp beds. We actually ordered in food so that we didn’t have to leave the room at all.(Yes, we did visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium because that isn’t optional). 

It was going great until night fell and the sea lions on the shore below the hotel would not stop barking. Then, in the middle of the night, when I had finally fallen asleep despite the sea lions, our room was lit up like a police raid by these huge lights (like stadium lights) on fishing boats out on the bay. This was not exactly the way I had imagined things working out. If only that had been the worst of it.

The next morning we were checking out and I rushed around handling the bags and the checkout myself so that all my parents had to do was walk a fairly short distance to where I would meet them with the car retrieved from the lot. I pulled up to our meeting point but they weren’t there. I parked the car and went searching for them. I didn’t have far to go, I had planned everything to avoid steps but there were two, possibly three, steps leading up to where I parked the car. My mother had managed to trip on these steps and she took my dad down with her. He was uninjured, apparently his Ranger training had kicked in and he rolled and recovered. My mother, on the other hand, had dislocated her shoulder. Paramedics were called and soon she was being transported to the lovely hospital in Carmel. This was my first experience of the feeling of helplessness and resignation that I would become familiar with as my parents continued to age and fail.

Relocating her shoulder turned out to be a lengthier process than I would have imagined, so I found a place for us to stay the night in Salinas, a Day’s Inn as unlike the nice hotel on the Bay as you can imagine. Instead of barking sea lions, we had parked big rigs running their diesels. Eventually I got them on a plane back to Phoenix, but I believe that was the last family trip. Their next big trips they would be taking alone and not returning from. Well, with one exception....

Final cross country trip

After my father died, my mother and I made one final cross country trip from Scottsdale to Bloomington, Minnesota in the late autumn of 1999 (See: Orphaned.)