Travels of My Youth
I love listening to your show. It's informative, fun,
entertaining and always stirs some memories for me. You see, I
did a bit of traveling when I was a kid. My parents were both
teachers, so they had the same summer vacation I did.
From the time I was 8 until I was 15 or so, we would spend every
summer traveling around the U.S. with our pop-up camper trailer
trailing along behind us. We went down South to Florida and up
into Canada about as far north as you can go. I rode a horse
along the Bay of Fundy, hiked the Cabot Trail, camped in St.
Catherine's along side the St. Lawrence Seaway with Russian
freighters on the right and the rushing river on the left. I
went on so many nature walks in national forests, I could give
the talks myself by the time I was 11. And did, a couple of
times.
We meandered around Maine, finding a little bakery run by two
ancient sisters who introduced us to the wonders of Granny Smith
apples and cheddar cheese served with fresh sourdough bread. We
stumbled into a roadside clam bar and ended up stuffed to the
gills for free because the two men who owned it needed tasters to
try their new recipes. Watching my mother, a born and bred
Brooklynite, try to eat her first lobster. "Bob!!! It has
eyes!!! I can't eat anything that still has eyes!!!" My
brother and I smugly ate our fried chicken. (She did the same
thing in Chinatown in New York when confronted with her first
whole sea bass.)
We had some disasters on the road, like the time the shock
absorbers fell out of the back of the car in the mountains
outside Quebec City and we spent the whole day at the Goodyear
dealer there listening to him scream at the Levittown, NY dealer
in French for his shoddy workmanship. He and his crew insisted
on buying us lunch and dinner to make up for the shame of it
all.
Or the time I ran a fever of 105 on the beach and was
hallucinating some wonderful fantasies. Or the time a strange
man yanked my brother and me out of the back seat of the car
because the trunk was on fire. The time my dad ripped the
bottom of the trailer out by backing over a tree stump hidden in
the grass. Normal things.
But it all seems wonderful now.
We always ended the summer with two weeks in Cape Cod, MA. We
would get to a spot on the highway where my dad would call
out "If we go to the left, we go home. If we go right, we go to
Cape Cod!" And of course, we yelled loudly to head straight for
the Cape.
Now that my folks are both in very poor health and my dad has so
little short term memory, it is great to sit and talk with him
about those summers years ago. So, thanks for bringing back the
memories and for giving me the hope of creating some new ones.
Erika
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