When I was 14 years old our family -- Ann, Sara, mom and dad -- took an early summer trip west. Dad spent several months reading, writing and calling to arrange motels, and he reviewed many maps for the drive. Expressways and personal computers were not yet in great existence.
Soon after our school year ended we put all of our stuff into our particularly ugly, hot, pale brown Oldsmobile Station Wagon. Ann missed her boyfriend for a month. Our motel in Denver was designed to look like a cowboy farm. We then drove to the famous mountains: Zion, Bryce, and Grand Canyon. We spent a day at each mountain, and were warned about people who had gotten too close to the edge. One night, at the Zion motel, Sara and I went to the soft drink machine. It operated in a very strange manner, and we had to collect more coins from mom and dad. The machine kept misbehaving, but eventually we received several extra soft drinks plus enough change to make a profit.
We then drove across the dessert without any air conditioning in our car, and landed at Disneyland, in southern Los Angeles, where we stayed for a few days. We stayed in a nearby motel with a pool. It was a big deal for us, since we had never been to an amusement park with so many rides and noises. We watched the nightly fireworks.
It was a gorgeous drive to San Francisco, where we visited dad’s sister, her husband, and their son. I do not remember them very much, but a few years later, dad’s sister burned to death in a building [she was cleaning a burnable liquid mess and dropped her cigarette by mistake]. Some years later her only child, our cousin, died in an automobile crash.
We visited some distant relatives in Portland, and then drove to Seattle, where we gave our automobile to a man who drove it back to Milwaukee. We took a train across southern Canada, and at one point got off the train for a few days, and drove through the countryside, and saw many wild animals. We also stayed in fancy old hotels in Jasper National Park, Banff, and Lake Louise.
We then took a train, slept overnight once or twice, and got back to Milwaukee. The entire trip was a month in duration, and dad’s plans were perfect. Unfortunately, that was the first time when I heard mom tell dad that he drank too much alcohol.