I’m not sure if you’ve ever been on a road trip, but I have, and I’ve written about several over the years. My first real adventure, not counting trips with my parents, happened the weekend I turned eighteen. I went on an overnight trip with Bruce Henderlight, a coworker from the grocery store where we both worked, to the Music Box, a dance club on Houghton Lake. We brought along his cousin. We were hoping to meet some girls but struck out completely. We circled the dance floor trying to look as cool as possible, but our efforts didn’t pay off. I don’t think we ever danced.
I took another one in college with Gary, AKA The Fox, to surprise a girl in Ohio. He’d been dating her at Western and thought a surprise visit would be nice. It was about a four-hour drive and when she saw us, she said, “What are you doing here?” The surprise was ours because she got engaged that summer, so we just got back in the car and headed home.
During my first year of teaching, I spent Thanksgiving break on a trip to New Orleans with my roommate, Mike Smith, and my sister Jackie’s then-boyfriend, Bob. I had received a postcard offering a free room, with the only catch being that we attend a short seminar about a possible land purchase, so we decided to take the trip.
I had a 1967 Ford Mustang convertible. My car got about fifteen miles per gallon and at thirty-six cents a gallon we estimated a fuel cost of about $50.00. Mike and I asked Bob to join us to help share the cost. We estimated the whole Mustang adventure—Kalamazoo to New Orleans and back—would have burned about 140 gallons of gas and taken about 17 hours each way. We’d drive straight through so sharing fuel cost and drive time made sense.
Bob lost his wallet in a bathroom stall when we stopped for gas and realized it was gone about an hour down the road. We turned back to look, but it was gone. We lost the wallet and two hours of drive time. Mike and I covered Bob’s share of expenses until we got back to Michigan. It was a decent plan, just poorly executed. And yes, I went to that workshop for the free room and ended up buying a lot in Florida. It seemed like a good deal at the time, but that “free” room ended up costing about $3,000.
In the summer of 1971, I took two road trips. The first was with my friend Chuck. I had a free trip for two to the Bahamas to review the land purchase I’d made in New Orleans. We just had to get to Miami to board the ship. We stretched it into a four- or five-day trip, stopping at beach towns along the way and meeting girls in each one.
At my second land purchase presentation, I found out the lot I’d bought in a development near Orlando, Florida wasn’t going to move forward as initially planned. I could sit and wait or buy into a new, more exciting project near Port Charlotte, Florida called Rotunda. Chuck listened along with me, and we decided to partner up and bought a Rotunda lot on a going-to-be-built golf course.
After we signed the papers, we took the free cruise. It was a quick one-night trip there and back. We met two girls, hit a nightclub in Nassau together, and I tried blackjack for the first time in a casino. The minimum bet was $2. I stopped after losing ten.
Later that summer, I went on a three-week East Coast trip with New Orleans Mike for his cousin’s wedding on Cape Cod. We took the northern route through Canada, planning to camp each night. We pulled a popup trailer behind his dad’s car. On the very first night, while tossing a football to impress two girls at a nearby campsite, Mike went for an over-the-shoulder catch, tripped over a lawn chair, fell, and dislocated his shoulder. A local emergency room doctor popped it back in, put it in a sling, and he wore it for the rest of the trip.
I did most of the driving after that, but we didn’t let his injury slow us down. We had a great time, and yes, we met a few girls. That’s what single guys did back then. They looked for single girls.
About three weeks after that East Coast trip, I was back at work at Plainwell Junior High. Two weeks later, I stopped for a beer at a bar on my way home. The girl I’d been seeing before the Bahama cruise and Cape Cod getaway met me there. Ruth was engaged to someone she didn’t want to marry, so I said, “How about me?” and the rest is history.
We spent the first three weeks as a married couple living in a two-bedroom, one bathroom, apartment with Nassau Chuck and New Orleans Mike. We all got along just fine. We got married fifty-five years and two days ago, but I lost her after fifty-one years and sixteen days. We had three children: David, Michael, and Elizabeth, AKA BZ. A few weeks ago, BZ called with an idea for a road trip. I said “yes,” and we’re heading out Wednesday morning. It’s going to be epic.
TBC