Vacating Hearth and Home

I don’t think there’s anyone alive who likes vacations better than I do. From the time when I was a toddler, I loved to spend time with my family away from home. It was such an adventure to pack up and hit the road with great anticipation.

When I was quite young, we spent most of our times away from home in Mississippi with our grandparents. (See Mississippi Memories) But when I was about eight or nine, we took our first journey to Florida to visit my mother’s second or third cousins. On the way down to Orlando where Bob and Pat (Bob was the wife) lived, we stopped overnight in Panama City. I seem to recall that we tried to find a hotel or motel, but couldn’t find one so we stayed in a “tourist home.” It was something like a boarding house, but you rented a room or two for the night.

My mother was resourceful with our food. We had a cooler that held milk and other refrigerated items so we could have cereal for breakfast. As I recall, we also made our lunch on the road. (There were no fast food places at all yet, of course.) We always looked for a church yard to picnic in, why I don’t know unless my parents considered it safe.

Then it was on to Orlando. I have several memories of that first trip. First, Orlando had lots of lakes in which to swim (someone said 32 inside the city limits, but that may have been wrong, and why do I remember little tidbits like that?) So we would go swimming just about every day in one of them. I vividly recall that I had not really learned to swim yet and my father kept trying to teach me. But we loved it.

Bob and Pat seemingly loved having us, but as an adult, I seriously wonder if that were true. Bob was a jolly rotund lady who laughed a lot and seemed to enjoy us kids. My older two sisters and I slept on a screened in back porch off of the kitchen. They slept at one end and I was at the other. During the night I noticed that someone was in the kitchen I assumed to get some water. But they kept standing there and I became quite frightened. I proceeded to try to awaken my sisters without the “intruder” hearing, but they were sound asleep. Finally, it became light enough and I could see that the “person” was a coat rack with a coat ant hat on it.

We drove over to Daytona Beach one day and that was our first experience at the ocean. We were completely enthralled and loved playing in it . Our poor mother, though, who had red hair and the skin to go with it, would get burned just sitting in the shade all day. And the rest of us with no sun screen, of course, would relish the fact that we were getting a good tan.

That was a great trip. We went back the next year too, and M.A., my sister six years older, took her boyfriend. I don’t remember where he slept, and honestly, in looking back, I’m amazed that Mother and Daddy invited him to come with us. He was fun, though, and we enjoyed having him along.

Those first two vacations were wonderful and hold many happy memories.