Come along for the ride...

Well, I thought I would put up a link to something I found last week for the lesson I taught , but since we have proved that I am not competent yet, I will throw out one of the pieces I wrote for the News Tribune last year.

The rule was a personal piece of 600-700 words.  I figured I had a unique experience to describe, and it would be a cinch.  The computer program keeps a tally, and I found that my word total was 720 words, over the allotment.  Oops. Tweak, recast, can't skip that point, still over!  With trepidation, trial and error, I managed to create a finished column which came in at ...699 words.  Squeaked through!  So, hop on in with me today, and we'll take off.  (You'll understand in a moment.)

Hop in the car and see the country! We can go anywhere there’s a road!

That could have been the family motto:  have station wagon, will travel.  By the time I left home for college, I had been in every state except Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, and Louisiana.  Louisiana had been on the agenda, but there was a pesky hurricane and we went home through Tennessee.

The first big trip, we had five kids, the station wagon, and motels.  We came here to the Seattle World’s Fair from Washington, D.C.  I was about to turn nine.

The next huge trip was done differently: there were now six kids and we had bought a trailer, a camping trailer, the kind where the top cranked up, the tent-style sides pulled out, and voila! there were beds.  We stopped at parks and campgrounds instead of motels now.  My father had scheduled business appointments all over, and we all went along.

From Washington we went to Chicago, to Milwaukee, north into Canada (where our trailer broke down and stranded us several days in Sasketchewan), to Banff, not to Vancouver because of the time lost in Sasketchewan, south to Seattle, to Salt Lake City (where we had ten days’ respite farmed out to various cousins), to San Francisco, to Malibu, to El Paso, over the border into Mexico for a few hours, not to New Orleans because of the hurricane, home through Tennessee and the Carolinas.  Eight weeks on the road with kids aged fifteen (me) to five; it is no wonder to me now, as an adult, that we had time with family in Utah, parceled out to our aunts and uncles, to give us time with our relatives and coincidentally help save our parents’ sanity.   The portion of our itinerary that was Canadian was for pleasure, the visit to Salt Lake for family, the rest for business.  What an odyssey!

We went through a few station wagons over the years; did the third seat face forward or to the back in this one, who got to sit where today, I can’t climb into the far back-- I have a dress, make the boys go--, but my senior year of high school it was time to replace the current car.  My parents did some thinking and some checking, and decided to go another route.  Rather than buy a new station wagon, they were looking at a couple of available secondhand limousines.

They bought one.  This was not yet the days of superstretch monstrosities, this was just your normal, black Cadillac regulation limo. (Unfortunately, as the Arab Oil Embargo hit later, it required premium gas.)  There were big, cushy leather seats in the back, and jump seats that pulled down, rear-facing, from the partition wall.  Eight people, no problem.

The first rule that had to be laid down immediately, was no touching the controls without permission!  It was presumed by the manufacturer, of course, that the driver was subordinate to the drivee(s), so the rear controls automatically overrode all the front controls.  There was the traditional glass partition which went up and down, and climate controls, and—here’s the kicker—radio controls.  Kids in back trying to figure them out, glass up, almost gave Dad a stroke with the volume levels that they couldn’t hear.  Do Not Touch the RADIO!   He said he saw “screaming purple polliwogs” in that blast of pain, but the family soon settled down with the new regs.

There were a few practical adjustments.  You parked farther from the stores at the mall because you wanted a place where you could pull through two spaces, since you were one and a half cars long.  You needed noticeably longer parallel parking spots.  But the most important thing, before the folks decided to buy it: could it pull a trailer?

Yes.  We undoubtedly had the only Cadillac limousine anywhere with a trailer hitch.  We were quite a sight with our limo, our tent trailer, and the eight people who would pour out of the doors when we stopped, but off we went again come summer on a grand adventure, north to the Maritime Provinces.  Have limo, will travel.  Let’s go camping!