On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Yvonne appears to be a person of few words (!) but I am willing to bet that this is a photograph from a very special trip to Denali and Wonder Lake. Perhaps Yvonne will show up in the thread to tell us more about it. In the meantime, maybe we can all share a few words about a trip we took when we were kids that is a special memory for you, or holds a special place in your heart.
I’ll start. My parents owned a small business, a local neighborhood tavern, so we never got to go away on vacation. Ever. Except once, when we went to the Wisconsin Dells. I have a permanently etched picture in my head of nighttime and beauty and lights and Indians dancing and a profound sense of wonder. ~WaterGirl
Yvonne
Ghosts of Christmas Past, In a Good Way!
Yutsano
And apparently few pictures!
JanieM
I’d love to hear the story behind that picture.
Nothing in my childhood surpasses the trip I made to California on the train in 1961, when I was eleven. I wrote about it here a while back, prompted by a set of BillinGlendaleCA’s photos presented as old-fashioned postcards.
Yutsano
I also wish my pictures from my two week trip to Germany in 1995 still existed. I got scenery, cathedrals, meals, friends, maybe even the best Italian food I ever had in a tiny town on the Rhine that I couldn’t even begin to tell you the name of. But like I said in the other thread, Lord knows where they have disappeared to.
frosty
We stopped at the Dells overnight on our way back from Yellowstone / Grand Teton. It looked so interesting we went back a couple of years later* and spent some time there. The best part was the boat tour with a couple of stops. The theme parks and water parks? Meh. It looked like Gatlinburg or any town just outside of a major natural wonder.
* That was the year my wife hitched up the trailer and said “I’m going to California. You’re welcome to come along.” I flew to Birmingham, went with her through NOLA and TX to Albuquerque, then flew home. Connected again in Minneapolis and drove with her the rest of the way home, with the stop at the Dells.
Steve in the ATL
Last summer I tried to eat at a Greek diner in scottsboro, Alabama, and it was closed for vacation. I was all “what?” and they were all “ “ because they weren’t there they were on vacation.
Amazing how Trump ruined even Greek diners in BFE.
Mary G
My dad was a preacher and we were always broke, so most of our vacations involved trading places with other clergy. In 1961, I think it was, my dad traded with a guy in Honolulu who had island fever, for a month. The cheapest way to get there was taking a Matson Lines cruise ship. (Link goes to an LA Times article about their cruises in earlier decades.)
It started to storm pretty much right after we undocked, and my parents were both severely seasick and took to their beds. So did almost all of the other passengers. For four days I had almost the whole ship and crew to my six-year-old self. It was not glamourous like the article showed, but I neither knew nor cared. They played with me, cooked me whatever I wanted, gave me tours, and generally were the best babysitters evah.
The penultimate day the ship stopped rolling and the drugs kicked in and everyone got dressed up for dinner and the talent show, consisting of me doing the hula routine I had been taught.
My only other memory of that trip was going to a luau where they tried to make me eat poi, and after my parents got to drinking and chatting so I could sneak out of sight, finding a giant stash of strawberry soda and drinking so many bottles of it that I got very sick.
Steve in the ATL
@Mary G:
Translation: I did well on my verbal SAT!
JanieM
@Mary G: That’s a great story!
Aleta
@Mary G: Fantastic. I bet your hula routine was a gem.
Mary G
@Steve in the ATL: I did, actually, 50 points better than the math.
Yutsano
@Mary G: 660 verbal/650 math. How I did so well in the math portion I have no idea.
Comrade Colette
@Mary G: OMG! Mary! We sailed to and from Hawai’i twice on the Lurline when I was a little kid in the early/mid-60s – courtesy of the Navy, because it was indeed the cheapest way to go, especially for a family of 5 (the first time) or 6 (after yet another sibling showed up). Some of my happiest childhood memories are of that lovely old ship. The crew were wonderful to us kids and took most of the care of me and my next younger brother off my mother’s hands so she could wrangle infants. The food was probably nothing like the crazy spreads on modern ships, but to our impoverished horde it seemed unimaginably luxurious.
I’m not sure it was the same Lurline that you were on, though – Matson named a number of cruise ships Lurline over the years, and I think the one we were on was the former Monterey/Matsonia. She came to a sad end – sank off Cape Town on her way to be scrapped. Matson’s current Lurline is an ugly car-carrier – such a bring-down for a lovely, evocative ship name.
Also, WTF with the picture up top?
ETA: I think it’s Mount Doom seen from Minas Morgul.
Redshift
We used to spend a week or two every summer at a lake in Maine called Lily Pond, where family friends had some cabins they rented out. I loved that place, canoeing, sailing, swimming, exploring the woods, training chipmunks to take peanuts from our hands.
We were often there during the Perseid meteor shower, and it was great for that – big open sky, few lights for miles around. The most spectacular meteor I saw streaked across about three quarters of the sky, and was big enough that it had a distinctly rectangular shape!
Bumper
I have two special vacation memories. The first was a trip to Disney World in the 1970s. We took our trailer down from Virginia to Fort Wilderness. It was in October, so we got to miss school (doing our homework on the picnic tables !) and the weather was perfect. My brothers and I had so much fun running around the campground, swimming and playing at River Country, going to the bonfire at night. We, of course, visited the Magic Kingdom, where the crowds were relatively sparse, but the memorable part was the campout. My 10th birthday happened during that trip and we had a special dinner at the Polynesian. Unfortunately, I thought the Contemporary Hotel was the place to be so I had a bit of a tantrum. But it all worked out and I got a shell necklace as a surprise. The memory of that trip is so strong and happy that my husband and I tried to recreate the trip for our 2 boys a couple of years ago. Hopefully they will have the same happy memories that I did.
The second special vacation took place in 1980. My dad was recently stationed in Germany and his squadron mates decided to rent a chalet near Austria for a week of skiing and snow fun. All the families went down and it was such an amazing trip. The chalet and mountains were beautiful. There were two other girls my age and we got to have our own room. We laughed and acted silly and really bonded. We would ski all day then have wonderful meals and snowball fights with the dads in the evening. Just the best time ever. It was especially powerful because my dad died just a short time later. I am so grateful that we had that family time together. I didn’t realize how much that experience had stayed with my brothers as well until my mom died a few years ago. We had a list of songs that could be played on the carillon at her funeral and we all three separately picked out Edelweiss as a reminder of that trip.
Laura Too
I love you Watergirl! Thanks for inspiring all the lovely stories and all you do. I will throw this up in hopes you read it sometime. (or for my own amusement as usual) Quick backstory to explain why we only had 1 vacation growing up: my Dad drank, a lot. My Mom worked, a lot. Dad was quixotic and would get a wild hare and was off. As a kid of 5 it was usually an adventure. He bought a brand new pickup truck (which had sat on a car lot & was vandalized unbeknownst to him) (it’s germane later to the story) and then decided we needed a camper. So we pack up early in the morning and head to the Gunflint Trail in northern MN. We had one day of site seeing, hiking a trail to a beautiful waterfall. On the way back we got chased by a bear because we got between her and her cubs. We went to leave the parking lot from the trail and the truck wouldn’t start. We had to get a tow truck to come and they dropped us at the gas station to get repaired in the morning. This was a Friday night, our first in the new camper. Next to a very smelly bear that the station owner kept as a pet/curiosity. (It was a thing in the 70’s in northern MN gas stations) Dad found out that the bear liked beer so they got along famously. We spent the next 2 days in the same spot because they had to get the parts from the cities and they were the ones to inform my Dad about the damage to the engine and wiring that caused the issue. By then we were broke and as soon as the truck was fixed we cut the vacation short and went home. I do remember getting Spaghettios, a rare treat, because my Dad couldn’t fish. Reading this it sounds awful, but it really was a blast. It can still bring my sister and I to tears of laughter recalling listening to the bear all night.
xjmuellerlurks
My parents took my sister and me to the Dells in the late 50’s. I was about five or six years old. I still remember the boat ride, the duck ride, and the evening watching the Indian program. I still remember in the show that there was a dog that could jump between a limestone cliff and a pillar of the same a few feet distant from the cliff. It was probably 10-15 ft high, but to me it was waaaayyyy up there. And there was butter served at restaurants, not margarine. It was Wisconsin, after all. Come to think of it, it was probably the first time I ever went to a restaurant.
I haven’t been there in 30 years, but even back then it was turning into generic American tourist destination, with t-shirt shops, Ripley’s believe it or not, Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, etc. The only difference between it, Niagara Falls, and Gatlinburg are the raison d’etre feature (river scenery, the falls, the Smokies) and accents you’ll hear. I’m sure there are more of these, just can’t name them off the top of my head.
WaterGirl
@Laura Too: I just got my laptop back from repair, and i still had thismtab open. So i got to see your great comment!