Road Trip, 1973
The summer of my thirteenth birthday we moved from California to Pennsylvania for our mother to attend graduate school on a scholarship for women changing careers. Mom was a 48-year-old divorced woman raising the youngest two of her four children, and working as a social worker for the county welfare department. She wanted to get a master’s degree in urban and regional planning and design.
Mom sold the first and only house she ever owned — a two-story fixer-upper on the edge of downtown, along with the first and only grand piano she ever owned. She packed everything she planned to take with her for the move across country into the first new car she’d ever bought — a dark blue Opel Kadett — which included my sister and me, our shaggy black poodle, and our orange tabby cat.
At the AAA office downtown we picked up our trip plan — a folder with the itinerary and maps to guide us — with our route marked in a bold red line from Stockton to Pittsburgh on a large fold-out map. At about 500 miles a day, it would take us six days. Mom planned to save money on motels by stopping each night at a campground, so three sleeping bags were packed in the car with us.
That cross-country road trip was the first of four that we’d make in the next three years. We drove the route in reverse next, returning to California to visit for a few weeks, and then back again to Pittsburgh. Finally, when Mom completed school we drove back home to California to stay. Mom did all the driving herself, all four trips, because my sister and I weren’t licensed yet.
Anyone will tell you, it’s a great way to see the United States of America, how vast it is and how varied, its landscapes and its people. I gazed out at the country from the backseat window of Mom’s Opel Kadett and watched the landscape streaming past as we rolled along for hours each day — mountains, deserts, and plains — bridges, houses, and barns — for a combined total of nearly four weeks between age 13 and 16. Memories from those road trips have blurred together for me, all these years later, but some I know for sure were from that first trip, my first time outside California, like…
The coffee shop on the main street in no-name small-town Texas where we turned heads, literally. When Mom opened the front door and we stepped in — a tall, striking woman with two suntanned teen-aged daughters in cutoff jeans (it was August in the afternoon, and the Kadett had no air conditioning) — each and every diner in the room (every one of them a man in a cowboy hat, western style button-down shirt, and boots) turned and hooked an elbow over the back of his chair and just stared at us. There was one waitress serving the whole place, a woman with dyed-dark hair, harlequin glasses and a gingham blouse whose age we tried to guess in the car later. She had to be in her seventies, we figured, at least. She served us with utter kindness and what seemed like delight, a meal finished with chocolate cake on the house.
