It’s a travel day for me. What’s your favorite childhood vacation? Did you see one of these?
Vodka tonic, you say? Coming right up.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Good morning.
My favorite trip was to visit relatives in Fresno, CA, smack dab in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. We had a lot of fun traveling from hometown LA to Fresno.
When I recently got a Mac capable of running Google Earth, I was delighted to retrace our journey’s route and make bookmarks of certain places we’d been to.
Good times.
That’s easy – Christmas in NYC. We rode the Spirit of St. Louis several times from Indianapolis to Penn Station to visit my grandparents at Hempstead, L.I.
Those in the Beijing zoo are pretty dull yellow, not so nicely white. Beijing was a lot cheaper and a lot more polluted three years ago.
where are you going, BooMan?
Favorite childhood vacation would have to be when I went to DC and Montana (same trip). DC was much nicer back then. People weren’t so rude. And you can’t beat the mountains/glaciers Montana for natural looks.
So many trips, so many favorites. All the major holocaust sites in Poland and Ukraine (Babi Yar), Hiroshima and Nagasaki peace memorials, Verdun in France, Flanders Fields in Belgium, Somme and Marne rivers in France. The joy of moving trapped souls to the other side like walking through paradise with angels at your side. And, this fall it will be Vilnius, Lithuania, St. Petersberg, Moscow and Stalingrad. I can hardly wait.
Sixteen years ago I was the wire, now I am the current.
Summers at the grandparents’ dairy farm in Wisconsin.
We drove all the way to Prince Edward Island, Canada, from our home in Long Island, New York. Two adults, 5 kids. In one 1960 Chevrolet Impala. For days and days. Hmm, maybe it wasn’t that great.
I don’t have many fond memories of childhood vacation trips. We lived in New Jersey and my mom was from Mississippi, so we’d get up in the middle of the night and drive and drive and drive. My dad was driven by demons to manage the trip in a couple of days each way. And then once we got there we were in Mississippi, so that wasn’t so great. I always felt like I was in enemy territory.
I remember, though, my dad and I took a couple of day trips to go on the tour of the Budweiser brewery in Newark. At the end they gave out free beer and pretzels (not unlike that Simpsons episode when Homer goes to the Duff brewery), and I remember sipping enough beer from my dad’s cup to feel a little buzz.
My fondest memories of my dad involved drinking.
Whenever I fly back east to visit my mom my first landmark on exiting Newark International onto the Jersey Turnpike is the Budweiser brewery. It’s my touchstone.
1969 my parents decided to move from Long Island to Los Angeles. They got rid of everything they couldn’t pack into our dune buggy which was towed behind our ’64 GTO. The cross country drive turned into the most wonderful family journey a kid, along with his three (well, two since Mom was pregnant with my baby brother) brothers could hope for. I can remember motel prices averaging around $14 a night and practicly begging every night for them to get one with a pool. I remember being amazed by an older waitress in a cafe somewhere in the Arizona desert telling us that they got 4 feet of snow in some places.
So many stops along the way. Luray and Mammoth Caverns in Virginia and Kentucky. The foggy hills of Pennsylvania. Watching the bats fly out of Carlsbad Caverns at twilight. Wupatki National Monument . The Grand Canyon, Painted Desert , Petrified Forest . Getting caught in a lightning storm atop Sunset Crater and remembering it as the first time I saw my Mom cry in fear. This was when visitors were still permitted to climb the Crater. My Dad climbing down into the Meteor Crater to look at the giant Peace sign that was at the center of the crater floor. Mom not letting us go into the Grand Canyon on the mules or on the helicopter tours because of a crash some days before. Getting my first pair of bell bottom jeans :o) So many cool things….
LA…all I remember of LA is one beach we stopped to swim at and the houses piled and stacked on top of each other on the hills. Dad turning down one job at a boatyard because he refused to cut his hair to be hired :o) Way to go POP! And of course, lots of Jack in the Box food :o)
For whatever reason my parents decided not to stay there in California and we turned around and headed back to my Grandmother’s place in East Texas. Longview to be exact, where my little brother was born. And then eventually moving down to Galveston. On the return across the Mojave though, my Dad was seriously burned when the GTO overheated and scalding water from the radiator blew him backwards off the road into a ditch, burning his entire left side. I remember Mom racing to find some help while my brothers and I poured cold water from the cooler onto Dad’s burn. We eventually found a gas station and Dad was flown by helicopter to a hospital. Pretty scary shit for a 7 year old.
When I think back on that trip I realize more and more how fortunate I was to be able to experience it and how those type of adventures seem today to be such a lost part of the past. I don’t know of anyone who would set off cross country in a car not knowing where they would end up with all they owned being towed behind. It seems now like an American trait that no longer exists. My parents were a part of the culture then in the 60’s that was more curious and free. Free to wander and discover and take life day to day. Unbound.
From the Sydney Morning Herald online:
Exposed.
not sure if it’s the same study, but it appears so…from the sunday lat:
Cable talking heads accuse broadcast networks of liberal bias — but a think tank finds that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Barack Obama than on John McCain in recent weeks.:
too bad nobody reads newspapers anymore, because you’re not going to see this on your tv.