On the Road:  Get yer kicks on Route 66

BUFFALO TO CALIFORNIA IN 3.5 DAYS

This trip was my first road trip ever and I still love to drive like a bat out of hell for several hundred miles without stopping! Mom and the girls flew to California, Pop and I drove in the dark blue Plymouth station wagon, it was actually a pretty cool car and I wish I had it now days in restored condition.

Roy and Nancy (in wagon)

The moving company hauled all of our possessions -- I don't remember the Plymouth being too terribly full of stuff but it could have been....

At the onset, I'm not sure what Pop thought about taking me, a 3 year old, in the car but it turns out that I was quite content to ride for hours on end just looking out the window or sleeping. The basic map line was good ol' Route 66, winding from Chicago to L.A. but I think that we circumvented L.A. to end up in Santa Barbara.

Much to Pop's dismay, about the first time we stopped for gas and potty, I REFUSED to use the toilet that had a brown seat!! I would not use the brown seat because I thought that it was covered with poop!!!! We obviously did not have had a brown toilet seat at home! Anyway, there was NO WAY that I was going to sit on that brown, soiled toilet seat, even with a Texas T-shirt! It didn't take long for Pop to figure out that Standard Stations (now days called Chevron) did NOT have brown toilet seats and those were where we stopped for fuel for the rest of the trip.

My other "want" for that trip was to see a "jail". Now why I wanted to see a jail still remains a question in my mind but somewhere in Illinois or Missouri we passed some sort of huge, fenced correctional (maybe) facility and I was satisfied. I also thought that the toll booths were pretty neat things -- I had no concept of money back then.

We stopped for lunch one day somewhere in perhaps Oklahoma City or Gallup, had a picnic in a large central square type park and watched a huge colony of ants haul away any kind of booty that we would put down for them. We spent one night at a motel by a bridge over a pretty large river, I have no idea where this was but Pop was reading a newspaper while I was supposed to be going to sleep. He was quite patient with me and we had a good trip.

Upon arrival in Santa Barbara, we stayed at a motel on the beach at the Harbor, the" West Beach Motor Inn". I don't remember if we were waiting for the new house to be finished or what the deal was, but the WBMI was next to a Sambo's restaurant (the flagship of what would become a major coffee shop chain in the western U.S. until the end of the 1990's) and I was convinced that they had THE BEST PANCAKES anywhere!

In the late 1980's, whenPattie and I were at another family's Thanksgiving feast, I met a man named Howard who had been the manager at the WBMI during the late '50's. He didn't remember us (which is good since there were four of us heathens) but it was a neat tie to the past.