Trippingly

I had every intention of daily entries for a big change, but I've been wrestling a horrific cold since Sunday, and it tag-teamed me with a body slam and threw me out of the ring yesterday. Anyway--

I have never figured out how Dad and [Great] Uncle Joe drove to Yellowstone and back in the Twenties when few highways existed and certainly not many filling stations. I do remember he said they carried spare tires and fuel. I don't recall the first long trip I had with Mom and Gramma and Grampa Koftan because I was only pre-school, but I know we went to Clarence, Missouri, to see Great Grandpa Koftan and I was very scared upon seeing my first blacks in a town that was very dark and in a house that was lit by only one or two kerosene lamps at a time, mustached Great Grandpa Koftan rocking in the darkness.

But the next big trip was after Gramma and Grampa bought a grey Kaiser Manhattan, and we went off to see [Great] Uncle Forrest in Deer Lodge, Montana. Uncle Forrest was the fifth Peters but considered the family black sheep, having left home young--I think like Dad's brothers later, he didn't get along with his father--and went out to Montana to work on the railroad. At least I have photo postcards of Libby and Kootenai Falls: "This is a picture of Mane (sic) St I marked X on the Depot roof" and "This is Kootenai falls 12 miles from Libby we were there twice last summer." He was also married to Celinda, called Linda, but I remember nothing of her. Gramma had kept in touch with him over the years, and he visited their Bloomfield farm (another picture).

In those days long before Ramada and Holiday Inns and Motel 6 and all the other franchises that help make the U.S. a generic whole, motels were tiny individual wooden huts, much like one I stayed at a decade ago while touring Minnesota's most beautiful route up the North Shore. The Minnesota cabin was a large room with bed(s), kitchenette with two-burner stove, sink, table and chairs, some dishes on shelves, bathroom walled off. The main room wasn't the size of my living room, with less walking space. That's what we stayed in on our trip when we didn't camp out.

For that was in 1948, after World War II, when Army surplus was the usual camping gear, certainly where Dad got all of ours, so that we had khaki green Army cots, a portable cylindrical aluminum stove that used white gas (I think), Army dinnerware, tarps. We added skillets, silverware, a large squat thermos for water, smaller ones for coffee and juice, a small cooler for foodstuffs. So part of the time we stayed in the separate little motel hut, and part of the time Mom or Grampa asked a farmer for permission, and we slept along their entry road or at the edge of their yard, Gramma and I on the car seats, Mom and Grampa on the Army cots. Part of the time we ate in roadside cafes, usually following the urban myth that truckers know where the best food is, and part of the time we fixed our own meals in the motel cabins or on the roadside. I'm probably wrong, but it seems like most of our breakfasts were somewhere along the road after we got an early start, coffee (not for me) perking, then the skillet frying eggs and bacon bought at the last local store. As far as Gramma and I were concerned, it was a grand adventure. We sat in the back always, and it became a kind of joke that I was always looking out the big back window where I had the best view of whatever attractions we passed. Mom and Grampa traded driving chores, mileage being kept and maps carefully followed so we could get from gas station to gas station.

I had been responsible for the planning, which meant that I had gone to Dad's town rival, the Crosley brothers' Conoco station, and filled out one of their Touraide cards with our destinations so that we got a kind of tourist brochure of that time, with the page on one side a road map with the suggested route highlighted, the other page with notes on the attractions of that particular map section. I should add that the Touraide brochures of the 1930s-1940s and all road maps were free then. I also had looked up in the encyclopedias what major attractions we were going to see. While I'm at it, I'd recommend the Reader's Digest's Off the Beaten Path for the same Touraide purposes, as I found it a major resource for vacations in my working years, though I know most use computers now.

Our trip was in 1948, as I said, and we were headed first for the South Dakota Black Hills, partly for the scenery and partly because Grampa's sister, Ella, lived in Belle Fourche at the northern tip with her second husband and her sons, Raymond and Lloyd Adel, but not Lloyd's twin sister, Lorraine, who must have been married then. I don't think we got off the highway to see the surreally barren Badlands I did some hiking in decades later, but I know we went through Wall because Wall Drug Store advertised from coast to coast then and so was a necessary tourist destination.