California Dreaming

A recent BB contribution about a childish belief that they charged admission to get into California prodded me to remember one of my childhood beliefs. I thought California was a city and was disappointed when I found out it was a whole state. In my mind it was a magical city. I had an aunt and uncle who lived there that I had no memory or ever seeing. My mom promised when we were old enough we would drive to California and see them. She actually said, "When you are old enough to wash your own underwear" we would go. I think she wanted to travel with kids who could be self-sufficient. The goal ages were twelve and fourteen. Having raised kids myself now, I would not chose a road trip with teens. It didn't matter. We never took that trip. California relatives came to us when we were about those ages.I think I missed the experience of a family road trip in my youth, so when my husband suggested we do it with our kids I was anxious to go. He had a brother and family who lived in California. We would take the kids to Disneyland. My husband was about to start a full time job after four years of free-lance work. He would be limited to two weeks vacation a year for the first five years of employment. We had not had the finances to travel when he was scraping together a living as a free-lancer. This seemed the opportune time to take a three week road trip. We made the final decision to go one morning and left in two hours. Two hours to notify family, stop the mail, arrange for the grass to be cut etc. We didn't tell the children where we were going until we were in the car headed toward Iowa. I even managed to cook fried chicken and wrap it in foil. We reheated it on the tail pipe which ran through the trunk of our big Ford Galaxy. The odometer on that car read 100,000+ miles. We made some lasting memories. I began the trip with a bit of bribery. I had a sack of hard candy and offered the kids a piece of candy every ten miles if they would behave and not fight. You can imagine the outcome of that fiasco. We had the wild bunch in the backseat by the time we hit the border. What was God thinking when he entrusted me with kids? We vowed never again to drive across the desert in August during the day with three kids in the backseat of a car that is overheating and we can't use the AC but must actually run the heater and open the windows. I am pretty sure it was easier to travel with kids than it would have been to travel with teens but who knows. Every now and then I reread the log and look at the photos of that trip. Magical. Even if California is a state. This family adventure was in 1978, a few years before National Lampoon's Vacation hit the big screens. I think we were the original Griswolds.