Chapter 2. From traveling comes the journey of our lives

Chapter 2.       From traveling comes the journey of our lives

We all travel in our lives with our families.  The travels may be local trips to visit family and friends of our parents.  The travels may be to baseball, football or hockey games.  The travels may be to games that we played in.  They may be to science museums or to historic sites like the Henry Ford Museum and History Village or Valley Forge.

In your family where did you go as a family:

Disneyland

Disney World

6 Flags

Cedar Point

Bobo-Lo Island in the Detroit River

Belle Island in the Detroit River

St. Clair Beach for a day at the beach

to state parks for a picnic

to state parks for hiking and strolling through the woods

out in the countryside to see the fall or spring foliage

Did you take trips as a teenager with your friends?

Did you sneak into Canada with your dad’s car without letting him know.  I did.  I was driving to a boy friend’s girl friend’s family cottage in a rural part of Ontario, Canada.  My first girl friend and I followed them up there or followed his instructions for how to get there.  I don’t remember which for sure now.  On our way back, traveling at 70 mph for over an hour, the left front tire of my dad’s car exploded and instead of running head on into a semi truck I was able to slow down the car to a stop with it ending up just slighting overhung into the ditch at the right side of the road.

My mother was away in Scotland visiting her family.  It was a foreign journey, what would have been my very first, she offered me.  In all my 18 year old wisdom I turned it down to instead work as a blueprint boy and spend the summer with my friends.

My dad was mad about the car yet mostly disappointed that I lied to him or at least had not told him my true destination.  He said that had he known where I was actually going he would have said no because the tires were too worn and old for such a trip at 70 mph because he would have been worried for our safety.

My life has been a series, a set, a pattern, a mix of journeys, trips, wanderings.  While I was growing up each year my parents traveled to visit relatives and to take vacations to eventually see all of the United States.  Each year my mother pestered my father to take vacations from his constant routine of working and his long, very long hours at work.  Each July or August once she could get him to leave town he always seemed to enjoy it.  Otherwise the only thing he enjoyed was working and being away from the house.

My mother was responsible for going to the local AAA office to get the annual vacation Triptik.  Each year I got to go with her to the office.  When I was young it was always an adventure to go by bus with my mother on those annual excursions in preparation for our family vacation for the year.  Once we would arrive at the office I remember having to “take a number” and wait to be waited on at the counter.  Then I remember the person carefully listening to my mother as she explained where we wanted our trip to take us that year.  Following that I recall the person bending down behind the seemingly endless counter to pull out the various individual Triptik pages, the magical pages, that would guide us across thousands of miles of roads throughout the United States.  Then the clerk would talk us through our trip one page at a time while marking the route with a brightly colored pen: green, yellow or orange.  Occasionally there were suggestions about detours, construction areas and even warnings about traffic or speed traps to watch out for, especially in the south.  Once the trip planning and route marking was complete the clerk would assemble all the loose separate pages into a bound book.  Our trip book for that summer’s trip.  Then the clerk would gather up and hand us the various guidebooks.  There would be the tourist guidebooks filled with descriptions of places to visit along the way.  Also there would be the hotel and motel guidebooks with descriptions of all the AAA approved places to stay including directions, locations, phone numbers, room sizes and rates and if a restaurant was connected or near by.

As I got older I remember being given the right, the honor, the job to follow the trip on those magical pages to help my father stay on the “correct” route.  Everything about our vacations would teach me skills that I would benefit from the rest of my life without me knowing I was being taught.

It was our vacation and the clerk was always the one who told us how we would drive our trip, what routes we would take along the various state highways, county roads, and city or town streets.  It always felt like it would be very wrong to not follow exactly the route that that year’s clerk “marked” for us.  It was definite.  We could not go on our vacation unless we followed the clerk’s marked plan.

My father had excellent map skills.  He was an intelligent man.  He read a great deal, especially newspapers, every day.  At one time he read all three of the Detroit Papers: the News, the Free Press and the Times every day, especially on Saturdays and Sundays.  My most vivid and persistent memories of him are of him sitting at our kitchen table reading for what seemed like hours at breakfast or after he ate dinner after coming home late from work.  He had worked very hard after coming to Detroit at 19 years old in 1930 to find work and eventually provide for his family.  He struggled to complete his high school diploma.  He took correspondence courses to only discover that the company was a fraud.  Eventually he enrolled in a mechanical engineering program at the new engineering school called Lawrence Institute of Technology, founded by the previous dean of Engineering from the University of Detroit, a large a private catholic university.  He went to school at night while working 5, 6 and 7 days a week often.  He finished a 6 year program in 4 years, graduating in 1941 at 30 years old.  By then he had 2 sons and had worked his way up through a tool and die apprenticeship to enter the engineering department as a draftsman and eventually worked his way up to become chief gear engineer of one of the largest engineering and manufacturing companies in the world: Rockwell International, the manufacturer of most of the rockets in the NASA space missions.  He became a gear engineer, designing transmissions, differentials, axles and other related parts of very heavy duty trucks and other large vehicles.  He was very proud of his work. 

Yet this very hard working and mostly, self taught man still let his wife go to the local AAA office every year to completely plan their annual family vacation, the only time he ever took off from work.

But this man who had all these skills.  This man who had been brought initially to the United States by his mother with his 3 younger brothers when he was only 14 only to have to return again by ship a couple weeks later after having been left with his two middle brothers to fend for themselves while their mother and baby brother were in quarantine for what turned out to be Tuberculosis.  Soon after returning to their small coal mining and shipping port home town of Blythe, England his mother died of TB.  At the side of her death bed he prayed to God that he and his brothers would never be broken up.  Within a few days they were divided up among various relatives to be raised while their father continued working on ships at sea as a ship’s engineer.  At the age of 16 he once more traveled across the Atlantic by boat.  That time with his father to find work and to join his new step mother and new step brother and sisters.  He never returned to England.  He never wanted to.  It held too many painful memories that he never shared with me or my brothers.

His job was to drive us.  His job was to earn the money that would make it possible for us to take our annual family trips.  His job was to pay the bills at the restaurants.  My mother was the one who chose the motels or lodges that we stayed at along the way.  She was the one who went into the reservation office up to the desk or counter to request the room or rooms for the night.  She was the one who had the responsibility to go to our bank and then to the American Express office to order and acquire all the traveler’s checks that she would usually be the one responsible for signing and cashing to pay for our meals and motel rooms.

He earned the money.  She banked it.  She parceled it out, giving him his daily or weekly allowance each morning or each Monday morning before he left for work.  She spent what had to be spent and saved as much as possible from what was left.  He did the income taxes.  That was his annual, highly serious and very frustrating job that seemed to take hours and hours at our kitchen table until late into the night several nights.  A job I still agonize over still each year even though all I do is simply turn over all the numbers to a friend who is a CPA, who seems to have a devil may care attitude about all aspects of life.

We each had our positions or posts in the family car.  My father at the wheel.  My mother at the shot-gun position.  My brothers and I and sometimes our Grandma Black in the back seat.  Most of the years it was Brian, Grandma Black and I.  The last few years from when I was 12 until I was 17 it was either just me or Grandma Black and I in the back seat.

My brothers got out of the annual obligatory family vacations as soon as they could.  Jim got a job in a grocery store before he was 16 (I was only 8 then) and got out of the annual trips because he had to work.  Brian joined the air force right out of high school at 17 (I was only 12) and bailed out of the annual trips.  That left me 6 years of traveling for 3 to 6 weeks with my parents each summer.

For years I have looked back at those summer family trips as a gift my parents gave me.  A gift I didn’t necessarily appreciate at the time but have greatly appreciated many times ever since.

They began a pattern that would create the most enjoyable career of my life that as a traveling professional speaker and consultant.

Imagine you are 17 years old.  You have already been in 48 mainland states.  You have been in Canada several times and you have even been to Mexico, though only for a couple hours in a very small border town across the Rio Grande from Texas, south of San Antonio.  You have seen nearly every famous tourist spot in the United States from the Statue of Liberty to the Grande Canyon from the attractions of Miami to the rivers and forests of Washington and Oregon.  Imagine you grew up with the building of Eisenhower’s greatest gift to the United States, the interstate highway system.  You grew up with the motel and tourist industry.  By the age of 17 you had slept in concrete teepees, hundreds of single and double motel rooms, lodges and bed and breakfasts.  You had eaten in hundreds of Howard Johnson’s, each time asking the many waitresses to tell you the names of all 31 flavors of ice cream only to order vanilla or your favorite flavor of the year pink peppermint with pieces of candy cane in it.  You had been up mountains, driving all the way to the top with all the windows of the car closed and nearly vomiting everything in your stomach onto the top of Mt. Evans in Colorado when your dad finally parked the car.  You had been to Mt Rushmore and Wall Drugs several times.  You had wandered through canyons, valleys, around geysers, through the highly manicured streets of Disneyland, stood next to stuffed buffalo, brown or black or Kodiak bear, driven through the streets of nearly every major city in the 48 states, visiting almost every state capital.  You had played so much license plate tag you wanted it to become an Olympic sport so you could complete every four years.  You had eaten chicken at every meal for 3 solid weeks one summer to only eat ham at every meal the next summer for 3 or 4 weeks.

I estimate I have ridden and driven over 1,000,000 miles on the interstates, federal and state highways, county and city roads since I was born.  I can probably tell you the road surface with my eyes shut based on the sound of the tires on the pavement.  I have seen so many Burma Shave signs I could recite them from memory.  I have stuck my foot under the back of the front seat of our various cars or under the front dashboard to claim I had entered the next state first.

One of the first things I remember being able to memorize and recite quickly from memory was our annual auto tag as my mother and I were signing in at hundreds or thousands of motel offices.  I have swam thousands of miles with my strange leaf-shaped not standard flipper shape swim flippers in so much chlorine water I should never have to ever blow my nose.

I’d swear that neon lights and billboards were part of nature as much as trees, flowers and shrubs.

Are we there yet?  God I probably drove my dad nuts with that refrain.  I remember our trip across New Mexico and Arizona asking that over and over.  I asked my dad several times “will we get to those mountains tonight” to only have him respond over and over, “not tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

How many corn fields can you drive through or past without them leaving a permanent image on your mind.  Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa.  If it wasn’t 6 to 8 foot tall corn stalks blocking my view of America it was wheat or some other crop.  We drove roads that you could shoot a rile shot down the white line and never see the pavement vary right or left.

Orange trees.  Apple trees.  Pear trees.  Cheery trees.  I grew up driving through orchards and farm fields, thousands of miles of them.

That is the childhood I remember.  It was school 5 days a week, playing football, baseball or hockey in the street on the weekends or hanging out at R&R beer and wine store, sitting on top of piles of beer cartons eating cupcakes or Twinkies drinking Coke, Pepsi and RC Cola, especially RC because it came in the biggest bottles and lasted forever and was cheaper, watching the television the owner had mounted on the wall next to the ceiling.  The guys hung out there.  The owner of the store let us hang out.  It was a “cool” place to spend most of a Saturday or Sunday afternoon when we were resting from playing another football, baseball or hockey game.  We walked back and forth so many times from Milt Love’s yard down the alley, behind Miller’s garages across the empty lot between the garage dealer and the building that the store occupied half of to R&R’s.  There is probably is a minor version of the Grande Canyon there today formed by our repeated trips back and forth.

My family trips from an afternoon visit to 3 to 6 week long travels completely across the United States left a lasting impact on my life.

Some of the lessons I learned from my father were…

“never be a tourist always be a visitor or guest, fit in, always politely.

Humbly ask for help, never demand or expect service. 

Be grateful and thankful when you receive service and help. 

Help or offer to help others as often as you can.” 

Those lessons have helped to set my approach that I have used traveling myself again throughout the U.S. and 93 foreign countries whether on vacation or professionally.

My childhood created my adulthood skills.