Too Much Vacation

This is a long one, which is why I've been putting it off. It was the summer of 1989, when we lived in "Green Acres," a tumble-down old wood and palmetto bug house on 9th Street in St. Cloud, our second residence in Central Florida and the first place we bought. We actually bought it while I was still at the plant nursery. It was the subject of a closing Carmen was working up at Land Title And Survey, and the deal fell through. The price was 27,000. She couldn't pass it up. John Geip was aghast that one of his lowly grunts would be so uppity as to own "proppity."

Anyway, despite many stories I could tell about this house, I'll get on with the story at hand. My parents had bought a used RV, a Winnebago LeSharo (kind of a long van with a wide body and a too-small Renault engine) and were itching to take it out for a long trip. Their little red dog Maggie was itching to go as well.

I was still suffering under the delusion that I was going to write a Civil War Blockade Runner story, so I wanted to see Wilmington, NC and Fort Fisher, near there. I also wanted to see Charleston, SC. We also wanted to visit the same friends as always, the Shetrones and the Buinickases in Maryland. Carmen wanted to visit her grandmother in Arkansas again. So this trip would cover ten states in sixteen days. My parents wouldn't go all the way to Arkansas, so they would go straight home to Vero Beach from Maryland.

We packed our little Corrolla full of camping gear and clothes, put a rack on the back for two bicycles (Carmen's and Brandon's) and lit out in the early afternoon, leading the way. Our first night was in Savannah, and we three decided not to pitch a tent that night. We stayed in a motel while the parents and Maggie hooked up in an RV campground.

Day two we stopped off to take a boat tour of Charleston Harbor while the parents plowed ahead to the Wilmington area. This was years before any of us got cellular phones, so when we finally got to Wilmington, we were flabberghasted to find that the campground we were all going to stay in was closed. How were we ever going to find each other now? We turned around and headed back to a little shopping center we had passed to use the bathroom and buy some snacks. As we were getting ready to pull out of the parking lot, the Winnebago went by, headed back to the closed campground looking for us. We chased them down and we all pulled off the road. They had checked in at another campground nearby and reserved an adjacent space for our first night in the tent. Whew!

Day three: the parents and Brandon went on to the Cedar Island campground while Carmen and I explored Wilmington, visited the museum, and went to the overgrown site of Fort Fisher. This was all very exciting for me to actually be there in the presence of so much of the history of the Blockade. Carmen tolerated it pretty well. We mosied on to Cedar Island and set up the tent again. This was right on the ocean and Pamlico Sound- very nice, breezy, quiet. We liked it.

Day four my parents declared that our next stop needed to be at least two nights. We took the ferry over to Cape Hatteras, drove some, ferried a few more times and stopped up near Kitty Hawk for two nights. We went to the Wright Brothers Museum on day five, and the bicyclists and Maggie got a good workout that day.

Day six saw us go through Virginia up US 17 to US 301, across that one dollar Eisenhower Bridge (see "A New Adventure Every Day" at the beginning of this blog) and on up through Maryland where we all (except Carmen, Brandon and Maggie) had spent so much of our lives. As it turned out, this almost worked against us. We were confident going into familiar territory, but it had changed so much in twenty one years that we were totally disoriented.

I don't remember how long we stayed at the Shetrone house. On Saturday Sharyn and Don loaded their kids, Brandon and me into their van and we went on one of their standard day trips to Rocks State Park in the mountains. (It's funny now to sit here in Albuquerque and remember the "mountains" of Maryland) There are trails up to the "King and Queen Seat" at the top of a mountain, and it was on our way up there that Brandon uttered the famous line, "Follow me! I know where I'm going!" when he had never been there before in his life. A couple of days were spent by my dad and Don trying to fix the generator in the RV. Anyway, it was several days before we parted company with Mother, Dad and Maggie and set out for Arkansas.

We went around Washington to Interstate 66 over to I 81 and spent the night in Bristol, Virginia. We asked at the front desk if there was a Walmart nearby. "It's in Tennessee," she replied. We were crestfallen. "Across the street." Bristol, Tennessee is across the main street from Bristol, Virginia. I guess the locals love to catch up tourists with that stuff.

The next day was the long slog across the length of Tennessee, turn left at Memphis, sixty miles south to Lula, Mississippi and across the bridge to Helena, Arkansas. Except the long, high bridge was being repaired, so instead of two lanes, it was down to one. There was a signal light to tell us it was the westbound turn to go. It told us to go. We went. Luckily there was nobody behind us, because over the top came an eastbound semi straight at us at a high rate of fuel consumption. After we screamed and panicked, we backed back down the east side and let the semi keep going.

The big news in the twin cities of Helena and West Helena, was that there was now a Taco Bell, pronounced TOCKobell. Everybody we encountered announced proudly, "We got a TOCKobell." It rivaled the time, in Carmen's high school years, when they got a MACKdonalds.

So we visited Carmen's Mum Mum and evil sister Tammie and pre-evil niece, Nikki for a few days, then high-tailed it home through Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. We came close to making it in one shot, but in White Springs, Florida, Carmen pooped out. It was nearing midnight, and about three hours from home. We had her father's Union 76 credit card for gas, and there in White Springs was a Union 76 Motor Lodge. We spent the night.

The last day was Brandon, bored, tired and missing his mom, singing a little song all the way down I 75 and the Florida Turnpike. It went, "Going up a big hill, going up a big hill, going up a big hill, top of a big hill, going down a big hill, going down a big hill, going on a flat part, going on a flat part..." you get the picture. All the way home.

We finally drove up to the entrance to our driveway, to be faced with a pile of rubble. "What's that in our carport?" asked Carmen. "Oh, crap, it IS our carport!" We sold the house a couple of months later.