Good Morning.
My father was an outdoor man who was happiest when he was camping in a place that had escaped the notice of Rand McNally. The reason he owned a station wagon was to haul a tent, air mattresses, sleeping bags, folding chairs, a collapsible table, duffle bags, boxes of non-perishable food and paper goods, a Scotch cooler for dairy items, a Coleman stove, a supply of towelettes in foil packets, and plenty of mosquito repellent. Sun screen with various levels of protection hadn't been invented when my father was camping at full throttle, and most of the time we didn't need it anyway because we were holed up in the woods.
In the summer of 1956 we took a six-week jaunt across the United States of America in a red Ford Country Squire station wagon with no air-conditioning. I had just completed seventh grade and was allowed to take along a friend because young women who had just completed seventh grade would have preferred to stay home and listen to Elvis Presley. Mr. Presley was frowned upon by parental types because he did something with his hips that had never been done before in public and whose recordings were enjoyed on the sly when the parents were out of the house. One was not supposed to be inside doing anything during the summer, camping was the perfect antidote to such foolish, sedentary living, and off we went. Among our many stops on a trip with absolutely no itinerary, we visited Estes Park, the Grand Canyon, and Carlsbad Caverns. We crossed Death Valley at night because it was 120 degrees out and were relieved, three of us anyway, to finally land at Sequoia National Forest in California where the temp was a chilly 75. We stayed there for a week by majority vote.
Throughout the trek we had bacon and eggs or those individual cereal things for breakfast and hot dogs with baked beans or soggy potato chips for supper. We made sandwiches at roadside picnic tables for lunch and occasionally found a root beer stand or a vending machine mid-afternoon. We got used to lumpy sleeping conditions and not bathing from head to toe for days at a time unless we were set up at a site near some form of God-created water. This was when I first appreciated the concept of inner beauty.
My father thrived on any level of roughing it with one notable exception. From the time he graduated from college until he was in residence at a nursing home at the age of ninety, he paused before dinner, whether prime rib on china or canned ravioli on a paper plate, to have his two Martinis, never less, never more. "We need more ice for the cooler," he daily declared on that incredible trip when he'd miraculously locate a gas station in the middle of nowhere with bags of ice for sale, and as soon as the tent was upright and tethered, there were muffled clunks as a couple of cubes were deposited into a Dixie cup resting on a picnic table or if necessary, a tree stump. Cheers, Poppy.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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