The Travel Journal Filled with Unforgettable Details

 

I wish I could remember how many years we owned a motor home. Less than ten, more than five is my closest guess-imate. We took it on several trips to the Deep South to visit friends, to Texas to a Romance Writer’s Convention and to Iowa, Pennsylvania and Tennessee to many gas station collector’s conventions. We also used it on day trips along Lake Michigan and on camping trips upstate a couple of times. When we traveled Out West, our most frequent destination, we took a pickup truck, leaving the RV home because my husband loved hanging out in the Rocky Mountains on the two tracks they called 'roads' back in those days.

For some of the years we had the motor home I kept a travel journal and yesterday I read through it with the end game in mind of putting it through the shredder afterward. When I finished the last page I decided it was the most boring travel journal ever written and I won’t have any trouble getting rid of it. I hope. It’s still sitting on my computer desk where I used it to pull a few quotes out of it to use as blog fodder. Those of us who keep blogs know how hard it's been to come up topics to write about during the pandemic and while my travel journal isn't insightful or as entertaining as John Steinbeck's Traveling with Charley who wrote about searching for America with his French Poodle as his companion, it's better than reading labels at the supermarket. I used to love doing that, by the way, but with the pandemic we're not encouraged to stick around inside the store any longer than necessary or to touch stuff we're not going to buy. And if you don't know it by now, I follow the Rules of life so don't expect a blog post about the most interesting food labels in aisle eight. Damn pandemic!

In May of 1993 I wrote in the travel journal: Here at Motel Walmart in Fayetteville, TN, Cooper (our dog at the time) thinks he’s died and went to heaven. They’re having a sidewalk sale and every time they call out over the loud speakers “Sidewalk Sale Today!” he only hears the word “walk” which is his favorite word in the English language. As for us, Motel Walmart was noisy last night with our own private security guards chi-chatting on their two-way radios as they watched over the merchandise that employees dragged outside at closing. At 3:00 AM I learned that one of them has an Aunt Betty with a bunion which I related to Don in the morning since he could sleep through anything. (We often stayed overnight in the parking lots of Walmart which wasn’t uncommon for RV travelers back in those days.)

June 5, 1994: We got on the road early with no coffee, no breakfast and me begging Don to get a map and some gas so we didn’t get stranded in the middle of nowhere because we were off to chase another unicorn. On a back road off the interstate---interstates, according to Don, are for people with no adventure in their souls---we stopped at a fruit and produce stand where he claimed the bearded old man wouldn’t give him directions unless he bought a watermelon. Cooper was happy to see it get plunked down on the floor of the motor home. He had a lot fun trying to hump and wrestle the last melon as it rolled back and forth. The old man’s directions were good, though, and we were able to find our destination---a tiny, over-grown and deserted gas station from the good old days of one pump and a Coke-Cola machine out front. It had one of those old screen doors that squeaked when it was opened and it slammed shut with a thud on your way out. It was nailed closed so we couldn't listen for those sounds of our youth. Where is the logic of nailing shut a screen door? If you wanted to break in you could just rip the screen. Don was in photography heaven and I was wishing it was 50 years ago so we could have bought some gas and a bottle of pop, maybe a bag of chips and called it breakfast.

August 15, 1997: This is the year of Don’s fuck-ups. Everything was going fine, great weather and we had lots of time compared to other years headed out to the Iowa Gas convention. Then Don got stubborn about the high cost of gas at the truck stop and that’s when we discovered how few (if any) stations there are between the truck stop and Moline. It was nerve racking on 80 with traffic down to one lane. Getting off the highway, we got lost looking for a station, adding drama we didn’t need---especially since we discovered on this trip that the motor home doesn’t start when it gets over-heated. When we finally found a gas station we had to put 29.30 gallons in our 30 gallon tank. After getting back on the road we developed two bad tires on the driver’s side and we are now sitting in South Amana where we’re waiting for two new tires to get delivered to a Country Bumpkin Gas Station with a one bay service garage. We’re calling this our ‘Grapes of Wrath’ trip.

September 10, 1998: We stayed in a $44 a night Motel 8 in Georgetown north of Lexington, KY. It was okay, no frills but clean and quiet. It was worth it just for the hot showers after three days of sponge baths in the motor home. We ate at a place called “Golden Girls” around mile marker 116 which was great. At least I loved my pork. Don had a t-bone. The national news last night was filled with Ken Starr and the report he just turned over to the House for possible impeachment hearings against Bill Clinton supposedly for perjury, obstruction of justice, witness-tampering and abuse of power.

And probably the most boring travel entry into the journal was the day I wrote: We planned to leave town at noon, but as usual with our trips, we were late. It was 3:00 before we headed up north for a long weekend at the Buckley Steam Engine Show, which they say is the largest show of its kind in the world with 50 thousand plus people going through their gates each of the four days its open. We took our time getting there. 1^st stop: gas $24.82. 2^nd stop: yard sale in Bailey where I picked up another Sterling diner dish. 3^rd stop: the Trade-a-Rama in Grant where we bought two jars of Vidalia onions for $6.00. Around White Cloud Cooper, Don and I sang a couple of versus of All My ex’s Live in Texas. You know Don has reset his body clock to Vacation Time when he and the dog start singing duets. Do we know how to have a good time, or what! ©

All my ex's live in Texas
And Texas is the place I'd dearly love to be
But all my ex's live in Texas
And that's why I hang my hat in Tennessee

 

Photo Note: The photo at the top is not our motor home but it’s close. We had an awning on ours. Below is my favorite travel photo. That's Cooper greeting Punxsutawney Phil. Cooper was fascinated by that statue's butt. He probably thought his nose was broken because he couldn't smell anything. That photo wasn't staged, by the way. He was a great traveler. He took his first trip in the motor home when he was eight weeks old and he played in a dishpan of water all the way from Michigan to Iowa. On the way home we stopped at a beach on Lake Michigan, thinking if he liked splashing water in a pan that he'd love the waves on the big lake but he was scared of them. He had more sense than we did. He didn't even weigh five pounds back then and the undertow would have killed him had he waded in.