The education of travel is real. In 1949 we took a family trip to Canada. To us Canada meant the rural area of Quebec northeast of Montreal where our parents came from.
I learned on that trip that feet could swell to a point that you couldn't get your shoes back on. This happened to Mama. I remember the poor thing having to hobble to a gas-station bathroom barefoot. I made a conscious decision that that would never happen to me, and it never has. Could be because footwear has improved a lot.
I learned of Mama's trick of traveling with salt and pepper mixed into one shaker. There were no restaurant stops for us. There were a plethora of roadside tables and Mama had packed plenty of food.
There were no freeways either and we drove through many, many small towns and one great big one - Toronto. Street signs and store fronts were all still in English but many were starting to be bilingual and we had lots of laughs at the French names of things. As we got into Quebec signs became all French. We were familiar with the spoken slang French, but the written word was something else. Jerry Lewis was pretty popular then and one of his comedic sayings was "Stop already" so when the stop signs said Stop - Arretez it made us laugh. Another really funny word was the French word for swimming pool when it was advertised at a hotel. We rather thought they should hide the fact that they had a "piscine".
In our suitcases were the first store-bought dresses I ever remembered. Mine certainly and probably the other girls too. Mine and Monica's were the same style and fabric but different colors. We were traveling with our best foot forward to meet the family. Those store-bought dresses were for the big anniversary party. Mama had a lacy aqua dress that I thought was the most beautiful I had ever seen. I don't remember one more beautiful at the party, and a lot of our Aunts had "money". That aqua dress didn't lose its "most beautiful" status in my eyes until I saw Pat in her wedding dress.
I would imagine that Marcel and Bernie helped with the driving. They would have been 19 and 17. Well maybe not Bernie. The trip takes almost 12 hours now, it must have been at least 18 or 20 back then, especially with all those stops.
There is not one single memory that I can attribute to on the way home. Just a lot of crying when we left Canada. I don't mean just me (although I did my bit), everybody cried, a lot. That's what our family did when parting company. Maybe because it used to be so long between visits. Even when people from Canada visited us in Detroit, the leavetaking always took place at the Ambassador Bridge and involved at least an hour of crying.
2 comments:
I remember it taking hours to say goodbye just from Thanksgiving at Aunt Rita's house. I don't really have a memory of us leaving when we went up to canada (I was probably asleep in the car already).
Family goodbyes always took forever. I remember driving away form Grandma Van Houtens and waving for the longest time with them standing on the front porch waving back.
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