Road Tripping

Today we took the girls on a weekend road trip and with the four of us in the car, I started thinking about the trips my family took when I was a kid. We could never get away with packing seven people in a car like we did back in the carefree seventies.

In the summer of 1976, just before I turned eight, my family took a road trip from our home in Rhode Island, down to Disney World in Florida. It was the bicentennial for the U.S. and down at Disney, they were building Epcot. I barely remember Disney but I have very vivid memories from the road trip. We were all crammed into the family station wagon. Two parents up front, my little brother (who was just three) either sat in the "way back" with me, on the hump between the front seats or in my mother's lap. I usually rode in the "way back" where we had made a nest out of sleeping bags next to our tan, hard-sided, American Tourister luggage (and where my entire box of Crayola crayons melted into the pleather sides of the back of the car). My teenaged older brothers were too big to fit back there and my sister who was 12 probably split her time between the "way back" and the back seat where she would have to sit between my brothers. We sang "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" and did MadLibs. We identified the cabs of various 18 wheelers by their hood ornaments and logos. We played the alphabet game with license plates and road signs. We are not a quiet bunch, it's a wonder my father didn't drive off the road into a tree.

We spent three days on the road, driving to Florida. My older brothers were 16 and almost 15 and one of their hobbies was collecting beer cans. My dad always says he drank a lot of gross beer on that trip so that my brothers could get rare beer cans from southern states. Besides drinking the beer, there was another way to find cans from regional brews. Every time the sun would glint off of something on the side of the highway, my brothers would call for my dad to pull the car over. They filled the car with used beer cans during this trip (although I have no memory of where they put them). In retrospect, it's really amazing how many people must have been just driving around, drinking beer and pitching the cans out of the windows. America the Beautiful, my ass!

I remember at one point during the trip, my dad, who was a two-pack-a-day smoker (Tareytons - do they even exist anymore?), coughed up this big phlegm ball and just hocked it out the open window. Well, since it was a hot summer day and we didn't have air conditioning in the old station wagon, the back windows were open too. I will never forget my oldest brother crying out in disgust when that glutinous projectile came right back in the window and hit him in the face.

Ahh, summer road trips. They just make me so nostalgic. That was the summer I learned how babies were made too. More on that another time...