I Remember

The summers, and traveling up and down the east coast this side of the Mississippi. We would take off for a month and travel to all the French and Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, and the Civil War Battlefields and just about wherever a battle was fought. My brother and me where in the back seat separated by my aunt to keep the peace.

We went to every state this side of the Mississippi except for Alabama and Mississippi (I always wondered if we didn’t go to those states because our parents did want us to see the effects of the Jim Crow laws). And in our basement was had a wall of the tourist traps bumper stickers… The Tweetsie Railroad, Cypress Gardens, Santa's Workshop, Colonial Williamsburg, South of the Border,  Luray Caverns, Howe Caverns, and on and on this places that we had up on the wall. (That I wished that we had saved… what memorabilia!)

We traveled from one end of Rt. 1 to the other end, from Key West to Magnetic Hill in New Brunswick,  and that we before the interstates! Every spring my father would go down to the AAA to get a trip-ticket of the roads we would take that summer and the travel guide with the motels and tourist traps. There would be notes on the trip-ticket like “Speed Trap” or construction.

Then in August we went to a cottage on Winnisquam Lake in New Hampshire. Things that I remember was not being able to go out night fishing with my father and brother! I so wanted to go out fishing with them, they used to bring back a bucket of catfish each time and we used to have a fish fry the next night.

I remember one year when  Hurricane Connie and Hurricane Diane hit Connecticut in 1955, I was six at the time. We were up in New Hampshire when they hit, I remember my father on the phone with the New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and Connecticut state police to find a way home. Winnisquam is in the center of New Hampshere, we had to go north to Lebanon New Hampshire, across up state Vermont to Castleton, over to Whitehall New York and down Rt. 22 to the Taconic State Parkway and then the Merritt Parkway. The only bridge over the Housatonic River was the Merritt Parkway bridge.