Road Trip 2...California, Here We Come

Probably most every kid raised in the 50's loved Walt Disney.  It was mandatory viewing each Sunday night, just before the parents switched channels to Ed Sullivan.  And after it opened mid-decade, Disney's TV kids all wanted to go to Disneyland.  The summer of 1959 was when I made it!

The success of Road Trip 1 the previous summer must have been the catalyst.  I got my map collection out and helped my father plan the route as my year in second grade came to a close.  The big day finally came, and we set off from Orlando headed west, in the early morning darkness again, of course.

Daylight came shortly before the breakfast stop in a little west central Florida town called Dunnellon.  In the restaurant, almost 100 miles from home, I was shocked to see one of my second-grade classmates at a nearby table.  After breakfast, it was on toward Tallahassee, a place where I would spend almost 20 years several decades later.  Though the approach to the Capitol building is one of the most memorable panoramas in contemporary Florida, I have no recollection of it, probably because without the phallic tower behind it that came almost 20 years later, Florida's seat of government in 1959 looked little different from the many similar county courthouses we undoubtedly saw on the journey.

The places remembered specifically on this trip, and the route taken, are more vivid than the previous year's trip.  We ate lunch at a picnic area between Tallahassee and Quincy on US 90.  I was fascinated by the old style water pump at the rest stop.  And 24 years later, I would pass the abandoned rest stop location almost every day as I commuted from home in Tallahassee to work in Quincy, which probably contributes to the memory.

We would have followed US 90 west in those pre-Interstate days, including paralleling the L&N rail line that I would come to know intimately long off in the future. The Ultimate Railfan Experience  I know that we bypassed Pensacola and spent the first night out somewhere between Mobile and New Orleans.

As I learned later, New Orleans was a specially romantic place in my parents' earlier lives.  But the morning we arrived was rainy and windy.  I think it was likely a minor tropical storm.  Certainly, I recall my first visit to the Cafe du Monde that morning...we were about the only customers in the place.  Then it was off along  Airline Highway to Baton Rouge, across the Mississppi and Atchafalaya Rivers, and the second night out in a motel on the west side of Houston, along what is now the Katy Freeway.

I probably grew to love Disney from the Davy Crockett series...I could sing the whole title ballad at age 3.  So the next day's midday stop at the Alamo in San Antonio must have been a big thrill, though I seem to recall a bit of a letdown to find the Alamo surrounded by downtown instead of the scrub prairie I remembered from the TV.

My first, but not last, trip through the Texas hill country...don't remember the scenery from that trip but loved it later.  Third night out was in San Angelo.

The fourth day on the road marked what I know now to be one of the shortest crossings of the Great Plans possible in North America.  There were the fascinating oil wells with their up-and-down, in-and-out motion all across west Texas.  There were the magnificent Carlsbad Caverns, far dwarfing anything seen at Luray the previous summer.  And those marvelous mountains on the drive from Carlsbad to El Paso.

The next morning was spent mostly in Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande, my second foreign country in two years and my only time in Mexico.  It was a tourist bonanza instead of a murder capital in those pre-drug war days.  I remember a souvenir or two and a visit to a bull ring, though I don't think there was much happening beyond perhaps a demonstration for the gringo visitors.

Now the memory gets hazy for the fifth day out, crossing the Continental Divide and going through Tucson, where we likely stayed the night, though this is the first day of the trip where I'm not really clear on where the overnight stop was.  I do remember the next day, climbing the last range of hills between Yuma and San Diego on a winding two-lane road and spotting a car with the same Florida county license plate as ours.  Back then the plates always began with a county number, based on population from the 1940 census, I believe.  So when we came up on a car with the Florida 7 plate for Orlando's Orange County, I recall waving at the occupants as we passed them (my father sometimes had a heavy foot on the pedal, I guess).

Strange that we did not stop in San Diego, despite the world-famous zoo, but that evening, just a few miles short of Disneyland, we stopped at the Mission of San Juan Capistrano and saw some birds, maybe even some of them swallows.  I was more interested in the mission and the gardens, as I recall.  Or maybe I was just excited for the adventure to come the next day.  That night was spent somewhere near Disneyland.

Unlike Clark Griswold's family, the holy grail was not closed the next day.  I don't remember the train ride around the park, which I must have loved...Disney was a rail buff much as I would grow up to become.  The memory I do have of my day at the park was exploring Tom Sawyer's Island and going on some Fantasyland rides.  And where are the pictures, you ask?  My father did slide photography, and I haven't seen any of those slides in probably about 50 years.  Not sure whatever happened to them, though I don't miss the mostly boring set-up of the slide projector and screen, to say nothing of all those dull pictures without me in them!

Next day was mostly spent at Knott's Berry Farm, which was back then mostly a real berry farm with a part set aside to simulate an Old West town, complete with can-can dancers in the saloon and gunfights in the street.  I do remember the train ride at Knott's mainly for the robbery that was staged on the ride.  And I seem to recall that I enjoyed my time at Knott's even more than Disneyland!

After the parents visited with some old friends along the Orange County coast, and my first view of the Pacific Ocean, though not one I remember, we relocated to a hotel in the center of Hollywood.  The next couple of days were filled with visits to Hollywood and Vine, Graumann's, sitting in the audience for a TV show (probably local...no clue what it was), and a journey up the canyons from Malibu to visit another old parental friend.  I was fascinated by the mini-amusement park he built on the isolated property, apparently for himself and his own kids and grandkids.  I remember the mountains and the coast highway, probably around Malibu...certainly the crazy chase scene at the end of Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World looked very familiar.  Oh, and here's a specific memory visible from our Hollywood hotel room:

I think we were up even earlier than usual on departure day...the better to get across the Mojave Desert ahead of the midday sun.  Santa Clarita to the Antelope Valley to Victorville and Barstow was the route, undoubtedly along the original Route 66 to Barstow.  I remember being very unhappy about driving past the Calico Ghost Town outside Barstow without stopping and probably stewed in the back seat the rest of the way to Las Vegas.  And what did we do there?  We ate lunch somewhere downtown, and my mother put a few coins in a slot machine...then off to Hoover Dam.  Since he was a civil engineer, it's not surprising to me now that the huge dam was a must-see for my father.

It must have been late in the day, and since the next day was spent at the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert, I'm guessing we must have spent that night in Kingman, Arizona, little knowing I would spend another night there 21 years later!  The canyon was disappointing, as the clouds and off-and-on rain conspired to hide the colors that my parents had looked forward to seeing.  Past Winslow, we detoured to the nearby Petrified Forest monument, where I recall being fascinated by the hard-as-rock fossilized flora.  That night in Gallup, New Mexico, I remember being fascinated and probably a little scared of all the native Americans we saw on the downtown streets.  Back then, for 50's kids raised in front of the TV westerns, the only good In'jun was a dead In'jun!

Other than our overnight stops in what was a rushed trip across Texas and southern Arkansas, there's not much to remember or say about anything.  Likely all three of us were tired and ready to be home in Florida already.  I recall a brief stop in Lake Village on the west side of the big river, where my father's family had lived for a brief time, which I learned later was about 1910.  We also probably drove through my father's Mississippi delta hometown, but from there back to Orlando, I don't have the slightest clue about the route, much less anything that happened along the way.

So began my Disneyland summer, which ended a couple of months later back in the third grade.  I thought it was just the second of many more family road trips.  There were precious few more to come, but my love for traveling was firmly implanted and remains to this day, when my traveling is limited mostly to Google Maps, StreetView, and following the adventures of my wandering Facebook friends in vicarious mode.

Coming next, I'll jump ahead three years, to a business trip/family vacation memorable mainly for seeing my first in-person major league baseball game in an old stadium in St. Louis and giving me the first glimpses of a place that would be such an important part of the formative teenage years still to come.

Prologue and First Road Trip

I miss traveling.

It's been ten years now since I was able to get away, to see the country.  It's no fun with the same place and the same routine, day after day after day.

I was six years old when my grandfather died.  It was my first experience of death.  I cried and cried to think that the white-haired man who spent most every Sunday with my parents and me, their only child, would never again sit on the front porch as we looked at the paper together, he reading whatever it was that interested him and me working out the words that went with the cartoon pictures.  It was much later that I learned what a cad he had been to his wife and his family.

Soon after, my father and I went to sort out the old man's effects, scattered throughout the two story cracker house in the orange groves on the south side of Lake Maitland.  I still remember how fascinated I was with the collection of maps we found, some going back to the 1930's, more than twenty years old.  I taught myself to read them, and it was the key that opened my young mind to the desire to see more of the world.

I had only a few memories of the train trip from some years before, in the dying time of the glory days of passenger rail travel.  But I knew, following the lines on those old maps, that I wanted to see as many of those roads as possible, to travel them and see the wonders of the world beyond my experiences to then.  It was the beginning of my love affair with road trips.

The following summer, 1958, would be the first.  This account of that trip, and the ones to follow, may interest few if any at all.  But for me, tied to my current home and unable to venture far away, I hope it will allow me to remember some of the best experiences of my life.

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1958

My father always wanted to leave before daybreak, to get as far as possible before there was other traffic.  So it was probably about 5 am when we set out from Orlando FL in what was probably a fairly new mid-50's model Ford sedan.  First memory was riding along SR 11 between Deland and Bunnell as it got light enough for me to read the map sitting in the back seat and looking out at the northeast Florida piney woods through a light fog.  I believe we made a short stop at the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, and I remember crossing the St. Johns on the new Mathews Bridge.  I got a weird thrill from big bridges, since one of the recurring dreams I had as a child was riding in a car that went off a tall bridge.  Instead of being scared, though, driving across the big bridge was a bit more thrilling than fear-inducing.

We must have gone through a little place called Folkston GA, which I would become more familiar with later in life, but I don't remember it at all.  I do know that we followed 301 north, since that was the bypass route back in the pre-interstate days that avoided the big coastal cities.  Somewhere in North Carolina, we turned northwest to the Blue Ridge Parkway.  I remember Mt. Airy NC, which later became famous as the hometown of the actor known at the time mainly for a movie called "No Time for Sergeants."  I never did see that one, but I thought Andy Griffith's performance in "A Face in the Crowd" was magnificent when I finally saw it many years later.

Then were was the motel in Luray, VA, and the nearby wooden bridge over the Norfolk and Western RR.  I was already becoming a train fan, and the old wooden bridges that have mostly disappeared from the RR's over my lifetime always have fascinated me.  Earlier that day, or perhaps the next, we toured the caverns.  Then I think we bypassed Washington DC, though that might have been on the return.  For some strange reason, I remember eating breakfast at a diner in Elkton, MD...no idea why.  Cross the Delaware and into NJ.  The Ford was parked at a motel in Bergen for a day while we took the bus into New York City.  There's a picture of me and the parents at the Empire State Building, but that's about it for my memories of the first visit to a city I would truly grow to love later.

From there we drove upstate to the lakeside motel near Plattsburgh and stayed for several days in a trailer park next door to the motel, all owned by my maternal grandmother's second husband, who I uncomfortably called Gramps until I was old enough to address him as Maynard years later.  I recall him trying to teach me how to start up one of the rental boats at the dock on Lake Champlain, as well as hiking a short distance and waiting vainly along the D&H RR behind the park for a train that never seemed to come.

Then:

Now on Streetview:  (motel office and residence on left, vacant lot on right where trailers were)

We also spent some time with my Uncle Jay and his family, Aunt Nan and Cousins Bill, Roger and Julie, who lived in Plattsburgh.  And there was a day trip to Montreal a couple of hours away, but I wish in vain that I could remember anything of it.  I do recall riding in the car to the top of Whiteface Mountain in Adirondack Park on that trip, if only because there is a picture of me with "Santa" at the North Pole tourist trap on the road to the top.

For the trip home, we must have crossed the lake into Vermont, likely by ferry, as I remember coming down into western Massachusetts and Connecticut.  Strangely, my most vivid memory of the trip is the wasp that came in through the open window and landed on my father's neck, to my mother's great concern and my pleas from the back seat not to hurt the poor moth.  I never mistook the two species again.

There must have been other wonderful adventures on that trip, but damn if I can remember anything else...

Coming next,,,California, here we come!