I have always loved to travel. Especially if it involves a road trip. Few things are more thrilling than the prospect of the open road stretching out there before me.
My earliest memory of a vacation, other than visits to relatives somewhere in northern Utah or eastern Idaho, was a car trip to California during the holidays when I was eight years old. I guess this was technically a trip to visit relatives because we drove to Sacramento to visit my oldest brother Lyle, who was in the Air Force, and his wife Barbara and their two sons. Stanley was three years old. And Terry was about twenty months old. I did not remember that Barbara was so very pregnant, but a little more than three weeks after our visit she gave birth to their third son, David.
But the trip counts in my book as a bona fide vacation because it was to a part of the country we had never been to before.
We left in the middle of the night the day after Christmas. My parents and the five youngest children (thirteen-year-old Gene, twelve-year-old Ray, eight-year-old me, five-year-old Dale, and fourteen-month-old Jackie) made the trip. Jerry and Kay stayed home to tend the farm, milk the cows, and who knows what else.
We drove though the night down through eastern Oregon into Nevada. Ray, Dale, Jackie, and I were bedded down in the back seat. Mom wrote in her diary that she drove from Lovelock to Reno and noted that the roads were good all the way except a few icy spots at McDermitt, a tiny little town on the Nevada–Oregon border.

As we approached Sacramento we were on a freeway, the first time I had ever actually seen one, and I thought it was pretty awesome. I found the freeway exits a novel bit of ingenuity and can even remember to this day, fifty years later, that we took the Watt Avenue exit off the freeway to find Lyle and Barbara’s place somewhere near McClellan Air Force Base.
We arrived at Lyle and Barbara’s place midmorning on Friday, December 27, and pretty much just chilled out for the rest of that day. Lyle was out on a flight when we arrived and came home a few hours later. If my memory serves correctly, it seems it was always grey while we were there, either grey and foggy or grey and overcast, but a lot of grey.

On the last day of 1957 we drove to San Francisco. My mom’s diary account detailed the events of the day (with her spellings and punctuation a bit standardized):

That New Year’s Eve was my first sight of the Pacific Ocean. I had never seen an ocean before, and I remember playing along the cold, damp, grey beach, and sticking my hand into the cold water and chasing the waves and looking for sand dollars and seashells. It was a glorious outing.
We ushered in 1958 by spending New Year’s Day resting up from the previous day’s adventures and watching the Rose Parade and bowl games and eating and visiting and playing games.

The next morning we piled back into our car, our 1957 red and white Dodge, and headed for home. Mom mentioned in her diary that we stopped and bought a bag of oranges and 12 pounds of bananas for just a dollar. We left Lyle and Barbara’s place just a little before 10:00 in the morning (Pacific time zone) and got back to our house in eastern Oregon about 10:30 that night (Mountain time zone).
There was a lot more snow going home. As we started up toward Donner Pass, we had to stop to put chains on the car, although in the end we didn’t really need them. As my predominant memory of Sacramento and San Francisco was grey, my memory of the ride home was white from all the snow on the ground and in the air.
It had been a fun, vision-expanding trip for an eight-year-old farm boy. I had seen and experienced all kinds of things previously beyond what I knew about my limited corner of the world. And it undoubtedly fueled my later desires to explore the big broad world out there at the end of some road.
2 comments:
*Ahhhhh!*
I don't know if it's the way you write it, or that we share some wanderlusty genes, or that I was nurtured in a family with such a deep appreciation for the open road.... In any case, reading this makes me want to hit the highway right now!
I love that you, still to this day, remember what exit you took!
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