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!
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