Bedtime Stories

As usual tonight, when I put Lauren to bed she asked for stories about her Grandma and Grandpa and about when I was a small boy. Right after she asked, she said to me, "Daddy, can you write down these stories so I can read them when I'm older?" I responded almost immediately, "Sweetie, I've already written a lot of them in a book for you", and I pulled out the printed version of this blog and read her three stories from this blog.

So I'll relay here, another bedtime story I tell Lauren a lot. It's from when I was a child, and I remember this story because I recently came across my own diary from when I was about 10 or so. I wrote a story about one of our many camping trips from when I was a child. Camping trips were prevalent because my older sister convinced my parents that we had to go on vacation each year. Without funds to go on a real vacation, she concocted a plan to take us on driving vacations throughout the eastern seaboard, camping along the way. She was able to convince my parents to invest in a large tent, sleeping bags, outdoor cooking stove and everything else you need to camp out.

The one trip I was reading about in my diary, was one time my parents went out and spent the money on a hotel room, because the night before we had a tire blow-out. I wrote in my diary, that we awoke the next morning and the car was already fixed, since my dad had gotten up before all of us to find a tire shop and have the car fixed. As a dad now, and having the same experience with a tire blow out, I'm amazed my dad handled the problem as well as he did and got us on the road as soon as he did, and that none of us got hurt when the tire blew out.

More often than not, though we stayed at various campgrounds, and visited various tourist attractions along the way. I remember things like underground caverns, state parks, Hershey park, and other various attractions. I also remember times we didn't make it to the campground and we slept in the car in a mall parking lot. The car was a 1973 Chevy Impala Sport Sedan, with a huge bubble window in the rear. Because of that huge bubble window, the rear shelf behind the rear seat was fairly large, big enough to be my bed for an evening, while my older sister slept on the rear seat, and my younger sister slept on the rear floor on pillows that my parents put in the two footwells. My parents slept in the front seat, in a sitting position.

Those are the memories I have of our summer vacations when I was growing up.