It’s 1968, and there is so much to be sad and angry about. I wake up every morning realizing that it’s not a bad dream or a nightmare: the nation is still enmeshed in the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June were all-too-real. It is just too much.
Rounding the bend of our first year of marriage, a hard year of teaching high school students, and living in an apartment where a mouse left tracks on our stove after eating our cherry pie that we left to cool while we went to the laundromat, Charles and I strained toward that clearing that would be a long summer vacation. We had diligently saved money from every paycheck for our postponed honeymoon, bought a new car, and headed southwest out of Chicago for our road-trip honeymoon.
Charles used to tease me about inviting other people to go with us when went out for fun. He would ask me with a smile, “Are you afraid to be alone with me?” He wouldn’t be surprised that I’m inviting you to go on our honeymoon with us. Just as we escaped from 1968, wouldn’t you like to get away from the sadness and anger of 2020?
We divided up the driving so neither of us would drive more than 200 miles at a time. The first stop was Miller’s Trailer Camp somewhere between Carthage and Joplin, Missouri. Charles is the outdoor type and had been quite excited about getting all the equipment to do some camping along the way. The closest I had ever come to camping was having a tailgate picnic in a park.
The campsite was cute with a little white house with red trim for the store and two more red and white houses for the showers and toilettes. We pitched our tent under a beautiful oak tree surrounded by white peonies. The temperature had been in the 90s during the day and was below 50 degrees at night. It was so cold!
After sleeping outdoors in the cold, I woke up the next morning with a sore throat. I could barely talk and had a headache. I felt awful! We packed up our tent and headed for Tulsa, Oklahoma. We visited the sites recommended in our AAA TripTik. Determined to keep to our trip plan, we pushed on to Dallas, Texas. When we arrived, we discovered that the Lions International had booked every room in town. After driving around looking for a room for more than two hours, we considered our options. We couldn’t stay at another campsite because I knew I was going to die if we did.
Our only option was to drive on to Arlington, Texas, where we found a room at the Clayton House Motel. We were excited to eat at a local Mexican restaurant, but my cold symptoms were so severe, we had to leave to find medicine. Notwithstanding the fact that the cold was getting worse—a throat so sore I could barely swallow, a stiff neck, and feeling sick all over—we enjoyed the sightseeing in Dallas the next day.
In Austin, we dropped our bags in our room at the Roadway Inn and went out for Kentucky Fried Chicken since my throat was feeling somewhat better. Although I could swallow without much pain, I was far from being free of the cold. I could not stop coughing and just knew that I would cough myself to death right there in Austin. Despite lack of sleep and exhaustion from all the coughing, we kept to our sightseeing plan in the capital before heading west to Johnson City, Texas, population 854, where we peered into the three open rooms of very modest accommodations at the house where President Lyndon B. Johnson had lived in from 1913 to 1934.
About an hour after leaving Johnson City, we arrived in San Antonio and went directly to the motel. Upon entering our room, the dampness and stuffiness set me off on a coughing fit so bad that Charles took me to a hospital. Going to a hospital emergency room with a cough is a bad idea. We returned to our room and I continued to cough, feeling bad for Charles having to endure my coughing and complaining. While I didn’t sleep at all, I guess Charles was so tired he could even sleep through my hacking cough. We found a doctor in San Antonio the next morning, but after seeing the doctor’s office and being around the very sick people in the waiting area, I decided that it was better to die from the cough than from some other disease I might contract from the doctor’s office.
Charles looking out from the top of the Tower of the Americas
One of our major destination stops was in San Antonio. We were excited about going to the 1968 Hemisfair—that year’s World’s Fair, themed “The Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas.” We loved going to the top of the “Tower of the Americas” where we could look out over the entire fairgrounds. We visited all the pavilions and toured the fairgrounds by both train and boat. We were most fascinated by the Laterna Magica, a Czech movie house in three dimensions—what we now call multimedia. The Hemisfair exceeded our expectations. We loved it!
Considering our tight budget, it had been difficult to find good places to eat along our journey. That is, until we discovered Earl Abel’s. We ate every meal there while in San Antonio. Food never tasted so good!
Next stop, Laredo, Texas, where we went directly to the AAA office to get our tourists’ papers. Leaving the office to get gas, there was a sudden downpour so heavy that we had to pull to the side of the road. While waiting for the rain to slacken, Charles glanced over our hotel reservations for Monterrey, Mexico. We laughed at ourselves when he discovered that we yokels were about to drive into Mexico on July 1, when our hotel reservation was not until July 2. We were so glad he discovered this before we crossed the border and had no place to stay for the night. Thank goodness we could stay another night in Laredo. We were able to get a room at the Holiday Inn, and we had supper in the hotel restaurant. We didn’t even complain when our main course arrived a full hour after our salad and beverage were served.
After two weeks in which we had not seen any folks that looked like us, we met a “Negro” couple in the Holiday Inn restaurant. They came to our table and introduced themselves, and we ended up visiting with them in their room after dinner. They were from Detroit and were making their fourth trip to Mexico.
After being in our room for a while, we realized that I was not coughing! There was no odor or damp smell either. We thought we’d celebrate. We needed ice cream! Charles went out in search of the treat, but the only flavor he could find was banana nut. Now, I had eaten so much banana nut bread in college—a charitable gift for poor colored students from an old couple in Charleston—that I’d said I would never eat banana nut anything again. But this was different. We were able to get spoons from the hotel restaurant and, with great anticipation, prepared to dig in. The ice cream was so old that when we opened it, we discovered just ice and soft nuts. No cream anywhere. We could not stop laughing.
Gwen Dungy 