For My Children: Childhood Vacations

 1. What trips do you remember from childhood?

Age 8, plaid shorts set and a 
Pike's Peak Bavarian cap
Colorado Springs

I was pretty lucky, my mom loved to travel. According to my dad, she always brought her friend Nancy with her on long trips, because she liked traveling too.  I think that was a bit of grousing on his part, but who knows?

I have snippets of memory from our first trip to Alexandria, Virginia,
and the east coast after Germany. We visited Jim & Elsie Blankenship, with whom my parents lived when Dad was going to advanced technical training. They lived in a Civil War officer rowhouse near the shore. They were very nice. I made a friend of their granddaughter Michelle. About 25 years later I went to see Elsie and Michelle visited too. It was pretty sweet.

They went to Jamestown, the Hermitage (Andrew Jackson's house), Jefferson's house, Wasington's house, and I'm sure other places. I have memories of Jamestown, the Smithsonian, and Washington's house, but nothing else. I remember it was fun. We must have gone to a Civil War site, because we each got a Civil Ware cap - my cap was Union and Angee's was Rebel - they both flew out the window non-air conditioned 1965 Pontiac Bonneville somewhere along I-74. We camped along the way. We had a stinky old green tent and blow up air mattresses. Good thing Dad had young lungs.

I also remember the trip we took with Grandma & Grandpa Hansen with Mom to Colorado Springs. We went to see Great Grandpa Perrin's brothers and their wives. That included Walter and Florence, Stanley and Olive, and Gertie, the widow of another brother. They all lived in a triangle. Olive in a small house, across the street were Walter's house and Gertie's house. Gertie was related to my Great Grandma Perrin and her husband had been related to Great Grandpa Perrin. Gertie and Great Grandma used to go on traveling trips together. I never thought of Great Grandma being cool enough to road trip, but I was young and she no longer was. Too bad it's so hard to see the young in people.

The entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo
Admission was $1 in 1969

We got to see the Garden of the Gods and Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Pike's Peak, and some other things I don't remember so much. This was right at the base of Cheyenne Mountain. We all stayed in Grandma & Grandpa's Airstream trailerat the back of Gertie's property. It was pretty sweet as compared to other camping methodologies.

I, of course, got a cap from Pike's peak. I remember having plaid clothes that Grandma made for me. I thought I was super styling. I liked Gertie best because she talked to me like I was not 8.  I have very fond memories of this trip.

I remember a trip to Clear Lake, Iowa where we camped with the Gerald Getty family and swam in the lake. We also somehow had a pontoon boat, which we used to go fishing. I caught my first fish - a sunfish, far too small to keep. 

I remember the trip the Gerald Getty family took with us up to Wisconsin. We stayed in a campground in Baraboo and there was a lake up there and lots of cool things to see like the German Shepherd who could jump between two tall rocks. We went to the House on the Rock (which I revisited a few years ago--it was awful) which charges a fortune for entry and it's so dreary and depressing I can't figure out why anyone goes there. I remember one night the adults got a babysitter from the campground (thankfully not a serial killer) and they went into town to watch the last episode of The Fugitive, where the one-armed man was revealed. 

On that trip I got in trouble and I learned I was a dumb-ass. Tammy Getty and I were told not to go in the water at the lake.  People were swimming there and paddling around in little paddle boats and having fun, but we could not. I had an idea. Let's ask the guy with a small, flat wood raft to paddle us out to the center where the big platform was where people jumped off into the water.  He did. Then we heard: "Lori! Tammy! Get out of there!"  We got paddled back and got a paddling on our butt in public. They asked us why we did it when we were told not to. I said, "You told us not to go IN the water, we were ON the water."

Just before we were teady to head back to Iowa, Gerald said to me, "Don't put your finger on your head, there's a bee there." So I did. And I got stung. It hurt.  

The final childhood family vacation we had was to Dubuque. I remember we were borrowing Gerald Getty's pop-up camper. Mom and Dad had been fighting a lot lately. It was 1971. The song, "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," played on the AM radio along with "Saturday Morning Confusion." I thought the Bee Gees song was so sad.  I later thought how appropriate it was as we spent a not so happy last getaway as a family.

I think I'll cover my personal childhood vacations as a little addendum.  See you soon.