First Vacations

As we've been reminiscing about previous trips with Mother, it occurred to me that we don't know very much about Mother's first vacations.  I've seen pictures and hopefully can post some soon.  I'm excited about taking a trip with my sisters and asked Aunt Allyne to write a few words about early trips with her sisters.

She writes:

I'm excited about the trip.  I know you all are going to have a great time...I think Norma's first vacation was when Aunt Nellie and Uncle Walter lived in Pittsburg, and they came for her. She spent a week with them.  I think she was barely four.  I guess it was the next Christmas she got a doll.  She put one of the dresses she had packed for that trip on the doll, and it wore the dress a long time.

The next trip was the trip to Nashville, Tennessee to the Grand Ol' Opry.  This was after she finished high school and a year at Kilgore Junior College.  James got her a job working for Jimmy Shepherd Abstract office which was in the county clerk's office.  She first bought the dark green 1939 Dodge I had bought when I worked at the Telephone Office.  Then, she traded it in on a new Plymouth, also dark green, and we all began saving money to go to the Grand Ol' Opry in Norma's new car!

Maeva was fifteen months old when we made this trip.  We bought a large ice chest to keep food in.  Mama made a big cake.  We would get food at a grocery store and stop at road side parks to eat.  Once, it was raining at lunch time, and we parked under a bridge they were building.

When we got to the Mississippi river, they were building a new bridge and the only way across was by barge.  The last barge of the day had just left.  We had to take a ninety mile detour to the nearest bridge.  The road was very crooked so we were late to our reserved motel.

They had rented our $8.50 rooms so we had to find others.  Cheapest we could find was $16.50.  We hadn't included in our plans.  We had reserved rooms for every night and budgeted our food and gas, Opry ticket et cetera to the penny, and this meant making a new budget.  We had little overhead but what if something else happened we hadn't included in our plans?  Lots of fun things and such a great trip!

The trip when Ava got on Lynn's husband was to South Dakota.  That was the one when James asked the Motel Clerk if she had a "swimming hole".  Jack laughed so many times about how funny that girl looked!  The motel where we stayed the night before didn't have a swimming pool, and that was Maeva and Ava's main conversation all that day.  James was going to be sure they had a swimming pool!

I've spent many hours through the years thinking about how great those trips were, and I just hope and pray the New York trip will be just as much fun.

Much love,
Aunt Allyne