29 Vacations
Vacations
We took few trips due to kids, paper routes, dogs, and my job; but I remember some:
The trip to see Ginny’s parents, in Glen Burnie MD was 400 miles and took about 8 hours; they lived at 110 Ridgely Road, off Old Quarterfield Road, in a split-level ranch house with a small yard. When we did that, which was several times, we would stay overnight; Ginny and I were accommodated in what had been her sister Lynda’s bedroom. We usually stopped in Maplewood NJ to visit Ginny’s maternal grandmother, Lula Davis Tavenner, and to fill our car with cheap gas. “Gram” lived on the third floor, and always kept her four-room apartment neat and modestly furnished (unlike Ginny’s mother’s house, which was always cluttered and gaudy). “Gram” had a canary named Dickey Bird, and always served a nice lunch she had beforehand prepared for us. She had worked a career for the telephone company, and even over 90 years old, she supported herself (and often her son in Chicago) by “companion sitting” for other, also elderly, but well-to-do women in her community; I think daily walking up and down all those stars kept her healthy and energetic. When “Gram” eventually died, we drove down with our four older kids in back of our station wagon for the funeral, where we first met her son, Russell. On one trip to Ginny’s parents’ home, we visited Annapolis, where is the old state house, and the Naval Academy; there we were impressed by the dining hall (of course) and the cathedral, where the college holds chapel for its midshipmen.
Chattanooga – our first Christmas. On the long 1300 mile drive down, going over the Smoky mountains beyond VPI at Blacksburg in western VA; our Volvo station wagon got ice in both its SU carburetors, and I had to stop several times to blot out the fuel bowls with a tissue; evidently I got water in the gas when I filled the tank. On our return to RI we brought a puppy, gotten from friends we visited; we named the dog Sport.
Trip to Gauley Bridge WV (coincided with a drive to view farm properties for sale, as we idealized rural life). We stayed with Ginny’s granddad AW Shaw by a coal mining RR track, in the small house he shared with wife, Virginia, upstairs from her sister, Ginny’s Aunt Connie (recently deceased); we celebrated Ginny’s grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary, admired the small flower garden where she grew dahlias; and heard on the radio that Elvis Presley had died. After Granddad’s wife died (they were childhood sweethearts), “the old music man”, as he styled himself (a state-famed band leader at the GB high school), took us in his Rambler “Ambassador” to dinner at the Glen Ferris Inn and his favorite “Hawk’s Nest” restaurant, and showed us the confluence of the Gauley and New Rivers, and the 876’ high bridge over the New River gorge. After his wife’s death, Granddad remarried, though a very old man, and also was baptized and joined the local Baptist church – evidently he experienced true conversion and the new life that only Jesus gives.
New York. We visited Ginny’s great-aunt, Amy Abbot, where she lived in the Methodist nursing home near the Hudson River (we drove by Pleasantville, where Reader’s Digest was located). She treated us to lunch in the dining hall. Amy had taught at Teachers’ College, a subsidiary of Columbia, and held a doctoral degree, rare for a woman in those days.
Ocean City NJ – a supplier/salesman to my company offered me the use of his condominium on the beach, we spent two weeks there. Joseph twisted his ankle in the sand, and Betsy lost herself but returned to the condo later; we bought “boogie boards”.