Ice, The Big Apple Motel and Aku Aku

My favorite thing in the world, besides Christmas, was our family vacations.  My father was the west coast salesman for his company and every summer we would make our way from Silver Lake up to Seattle where we would spend time with my mother's best friend and her three sons.

We usually left as soon as school got out.  The night before our departure my father would disappear into the garage and load the musty smelling four-person tent, the Coleman stove, pots and pans, food and our suitcases into the back of the Chevrolet station wagon. He took great care stowing everything so it was nice and flat.  Then he covered it with two soft layers of flannel sleeping bags.  The nest was where my sister and I would stretch out and sleep. This was also before seatbelts.

Because my mother could not tolerate heat, and our first day's drive inevitably took us through Bakersfield and the Central Valley, we left well before sun up.  My sister and I crawled into the "nest" and fell back to sleep listening to the muted tones of our parents' conversation and quiet sounds of the night highway.

One year, a particularly hot one, we could not avoid the Bakersfield heat.  My father pulled into a gas station and disappeared for a moment.  When he returned, he was carrying a huge block of ice.  He set it on the floor in front of my mother, opened the air vent and declared that we had "air conditioning."

These trips were a working vacation for my father.  My mother kept a careful log of all mileage and expenditures.  Some nights the four of us would share a room in roadside motels with names like The Big Apple or The Blue Lantern. These places were not the sort to have miniature "amenities" in the bathroom. One tiny bar of soap was all that was on offer.  I was in Heaven when our night's stop included an overly chlorinated swimming pool. 

 Breakfasts would be in coffee shops that served little boxes of cold cereal that you could pour the milk right into.  Lunches were often picnics in public parks where we'd play while my father made his business "calls." 

My father always enjoyed educating us through the real world. We toured the Tillamook cheese factory, the Birdseye pea plant, and numerous national parks and museums.  When my mother wanted to nap, I would crawl over the seat, be handed the map and become the navigator.

To make the driving time pass more easily my mother would read to all of us.  "Born Free" and "Living Free” were my favorites.  My father loved "Kon Tiki" and "Aku Aku”--- maybe because as he piloted the Chevy through the roads and highways of the West he felt an affinity with Thor Heyerdahl.