Another smart move, apart from having three of us in a car not well-suited to purpose, was the situation vis a vis gas that year (1979). As I am writing this for a retirement site it may be reasonable to assume that you remember the gas crisis. This was the context for our trip and this in a car that did about 12 miles to the gallon.
I don’t think I can quite do justice to the glamour of this enterprise. We, little old us from Leeds in Yorkshire, were going to drive 7,000 miles across America, up and back across by a different route. Jack Kerouac step aside, Paul Simon we’ve also come to look for America. Accompanied by Dire Straits, Dan Fogelberg, James Taylor and fittingly, America themselves, the very embodiment of the country, and many others, we drove from Washington DC to Los Angeles, up the coast on Highway One, stopping in San Francisco when it was the place to be, to the other Washington and then back again by the Northern route, via Yellowstone Park etc. We navigated with a Rand McNally road atlas which I still have and also the book of campsites we used to choose our nightly stop overs, those that didn’t involve staying with friends of friends, (we were after all quite poor) or just people we met on the road and who mistakenly suggested we come and stay with them little knowing that we just had the brass neck, as they say in Yorkshire, to show up on their doorstep looking sad, pathetic and British. For some reason we never could fathom being British and having a cute three year old made us an attractive proposition in America that year.
We stayed with people, Hal and Marie for example, who we met in the Rocky Mountain National Park. They lived in Palos Verde and they had a hot tub on the deck, a hot tub for heaven’s sake, overlooking the Queen Elizabeth on Long Beach I think it was. This was the America we’d been reading about. Thank you, Hal and Marie, 36 years too late. And to the many others who made the trip iconic, a big thank you.
I’m going to stop now although there is more to tell. I’ve been writing this in bed first thing in the morning, for some reason this is my best writing time, but now the pups have arrived, two, 7 month old, border collies. They’ve been released to come upstairs, they leap on to the bed snarling and snapping, trying to bite each other’s heads and /or limbs off, pausing every now and then to look at me and say this is fun isn’t it? So I stop writing. And here – the pups – is one big reason why we don’t travel these days. There are others but, at the risk of repeating myself, they may be for another time.
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Loved your article. I post on this site as well. I grew up in Rockville, MD and was teaching HS English during your road trip. Just got a new puppy too and understand your dilemma. Happy writing and traveling!