A Road Trip

Darlings

This is a story of a year-long road trip, 1970-71. I bought a ratty-old mail truck for $400. A carpenter and a welder helped me turn it into a habitable camper – sort of.

When you’ve got a camper, or recreational vehicle if you’re going to be fancy-shmancy, you can go anywhere you want. For instance, the picture on the title page was taken from the top of the lighthouse on Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. It was cold, so the sailboat stayed on top.

 

 

But it was warm when we got to Florida. Sailing at sunset was fun.

On the way south, we played with seagulls on the Jersey shore. Seagulls are suckers for potato chips.

 

And just like Evan in this picture, you can hike in the Florida Keys with your Dad. (I’m showing off here, letting you know that in the olden days I had a flat stomach).

 

Campgrounds were not always so nice back then. This one on Montauk Point, on the east end of Long Island, was just a big field with a spigot we shared with three other campsites. In this picture, a neighbor lady is drawing water while Evan digs for beetles. He was two-and-a-half.

It was a bit crowded in the camper and necessary to be neat all the time because storage space was limited. We each had two small plastic wash bins for our clothes. Anything else went in the box on top of the truck. By then, Evan was three; Todd six; Mark thirteen. Patricia and I were… well, never mind.

In this picture, Todd got his nose bent out of joint because I told him to, “clean up your room!” Evan liked that his brother got in trouble.

 

We put up our tent (on the left) if we stayed someplace for a while, like Chokoloskee Island in the Everglades where we opened Christmas presents that Santa left spread out on a blue tarpaulin.

When we got tired of the heat and humidity, we crossed the state of Florida on Alligator Alley and headed north on I-95 to a place where it snowed on Thanksgiving – New Paltz, New York.

So, if you ever get the chance to take a long road trip and act like aging hippies or drop-outs from the beat generation … but that’s another story, which maybe I’ll tell you someday.

A long road trip in a camper is different than traveling on planes and trains and staying in nice hotels. But we had lots of fun!

 

Poppa

P.S. I should tell you, in the Recreational Vehicle (RV) world there are two categories of home-made campers. Big Uglies – school buses and the like. The second is all kinds of vans. You guessed it. Our step van was a Little Ugly.

That’s okay. It kept the rain out.