April and the Cascade Crew's Excellent Adventure

This is written in response to the question: What was your first big trip?

My family didn’t go on many/any real vacation trips when I was growing up. Most of our trips involved going to visit family for a few days. I can remember going to Anglin Branch to visit Grandpa and Grandma Smith. After we moved to Tennessee, we would travel back to Ohio to visit family. I suppose that the biggest, sort of real vacation, trip that I made with my family was when we all went to visit my Aunt Carmen in Virginia just outside of Washington DC. Uncle Olen, Aunt Pooper (Beth), Eric, and my cousin Tracy went with us. We went to many of the museums of the Smithsonian, the zoo, Mt Vernon… It was a great trip.

I suppose that my “biggest” trip was after my high school graduation. Some of my friends and I went down to Florida for a week. We didn’t have much money so we had to plan around that. Philip Ayers was going to drive and we were going to take coolers and tents and camping stuff and find a campground to camp out. Eddie Coop and Philip Ayers were still juniors, but my friends and I hung out with them all of the time and they went on the trip. Since we had little money, we figured that we could only afford to camp out. I think that Philip Ayers, Eddie Coop, Carol Grubbs, Lydia Brothers, another Junior, and I went on that trip. I think that’s right. Some of us hung out so often, it is hard to imagine them not being involved in all of my adventures.

So we load all of this camping stuff into Philip’s car and then we load ourselves into the car. It was a two-door car. I can’t recall the make and model but I know that it wasn’t a big roomy Grand Marquis or such. We were packed to the gills with camping gear and kids. As I recall, three sat in the front and the car was a standard transmission with the stick shift on the floor. I can remember every time the gears had to be changed that Philip had to yell shift so that the person sitting in the middle could shift before he could shift. I’m not sure, I may be getting that part confused with a spooking trip but I think that was the Florida trip.

So here we were, driving down to Florida, the windows down, the wind blowing our hair, the music blaring and us singing, or in my case trying to sing, along to Journey, Kansas, Aerosmith, ACDC, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Lynyrd Skynyrd… with Philip occasionally yelling “Shift”! It was such a wonderfully, magical, carefree time!

We made it to St Augustine in one piece and we ended up having enough money to rent a bungalow right on the beach! That was the first time I had seen the ocean and I was blessed to be able to see it with friends that I loved.

I remember that first view of the ocean. I had always known that the ocean was massive, but until I had seen it, just how massive it truly is was beyond my comprehension. It still amazes me to think that my ancestors dared to climb aboard small wooden boats, more akin to a collection of toothpicks than a modern cruise ship, and cross that vast expanse!

My friends and I went to the grocery, stopped by a liquor store, and then stayed put in that little bungalow and on the beach for the rest of the week. Even my ears got sunburned, but that week of friendship, ocean, music, and frozen daiquiris was a carefree, wonderful week that I will always remember. I so enjoyed that trip with them and I have never really had another trip quite like that one, quite so carefree. We thoroughly enjoyed our week and we reluctantly left when our time was up. We drove back home with the windows down, our hair blowing, the music blaring and our voices mingling in a more tired but still joyous chorus of song!

Miraculously, we all made it back home in one piece, perhaps an even bigger piece than before our adventure! We left behind that lovely little bungalow on the beach, but we were carrying away with us memories of the beautiful time we had spent there!