Describe a family road trip from your childhood. Where did you go and why? Who was in the car? How did you pass the time?
My family went on a LOT of road trips for vacations when I was a child. With seven of us, it was just too expensive to fly (although one year, 1970, we did take the train to Chicago). Some trips were fairly short, like to New Braunfels or the Frio River in Texas, or to the New Orleans area. The longest trip we took was to Rochester, New York, in 1971, camping most nights in an eight-man tent there and back to Houston, Texas.
The photos below are from a trip to New Mexico in the summer of 1966. I was nine and got my first camera, a Brownie, that year. I took a LOT of pictures at roadside parks where we'd stop for a picnic lunch Mom had packed, often photographing my siblings holding the colorful paper plates we used.
In the photo above left, you can see our Chevrolet station wagon in the background. My two brothers rode in the back. I know eventually we had a station wagon with a third seat back there, but I'm not sure if this was it. My two sisters and Mom usually sat in the regular back seat. Mary, the youngest, was not quite two in the summer of 1966, and she would have been in the middle of that seat.
I usually sat in the front passenger seat, often serving as the navigator, reading the map and telling Dad where to turn. I remember playing license plate games, and alphabet/spotting games, but mostly I remember just looking out the window and enjoying the sights.
© Amanda Pape - 2011 - click here to e-mail me.
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