Where shall I start on the vacations our family have taken? We always took a vacation each year as Harry got a week, then two weeks and we never got to getting three weeks like they do now.

Our first vacation was at Christmas time and we traveled back to Nogales to see Harry’s family. We had our ’39 Chevrolet coup and we filled the area back of the seat with quilts and blankets to make a bed for our 7 month old son, Larry. He always traveled well in the day time, but did not like the night travel. Many times when we went to Itasca at night, he would cry from town to town until he saw light again, then he would hush till it was dark again.

Each year we usually visited relatives as we had little money to take vacation on. I would plan ahead and would pay all our bills for a month in advance, (now, mind you, these were 10 and 20 dollar payments on things we had bought. I never bought more than we could pay out by the month in small payments. We would usually only buy things we had to have, such as a refrigerator or large things except at Christmas. At that time I would put the childrens’ toys on lay-away in September and pay them out before Christmas. But I would have one pay check clear each year for vacation. We always loved to travel.

Our biggest trips were to Cincinnati Ohio and Lynn Mass. to see George and Marilyn. One year I wanted to meet Daddy’s folks in Tennessee and so did Mother. We agreed to take them there and Daddy would pay for everything. So we left with Larry and Mother and Daddy in the summer of 1949 and I was about 4 months pregnant with Sue. We had a wonderful trip and all the Pruitts from Ohio, Tennessee, and Alabama came to see us. Eula, the oldest of the Pruitt children by Miss Elzina, treated us royally. I guess they were just as anxious to see what we looked like as we were to see them. Mr Pruitt died while I was in Nursing school and we never met him. But some of the Pruitt men ( half-brothers of Daddy) did not come. Only Uncle Woodie and his children came and all the girls. this was the time that Larry flashed the camera in his eye and made the adhesion on his eye, causing in later years, the myopia. It was a wonderful trip and we did enjoy meeting all of them.

We made several trips to Arizona, one most enjoyable one with Sam and Glenda and the children. We both had station wagons and we camped out and cooked all our meals. We toured Arizona, Grand Canyon, Painted Desert and Nogales across the line into Old Mexico. We saw where Harry and Glenda grew up and visited the places they was so familiar with. The children enjoyed the trip and will always remember changing places in the cars so the men were in one car and the women in the other.

Our trips with Larry and Sue were always a lot of fun to plan. One trip when we went north to Boston, we came through Akron Ohio, Niagara Falls, New York City, Boston, and Washington D.C. We continued on south to Tennessee to see Aunt Eula and on to Houston. It was a long trip to make in 2 weeks, but we moved pretty fast. One thing we will always remember about the trip was in Washington D.C. We stopped at a Hamburger Cafe about 10 AM and the children ordered a Hamburger. The people in the cafe thought that strange, so someone went out and looked at our license plate and we saw them mouth “Oklahoma”. We had a big laugh over that. I guess hamburgers were not ordered in the morning out there. Of course, when you get up from the night at 4 or 5 AM you are hungry by 10…..

After the children went to college and Daddy would stay a couple of weeks alone in Itasca, we made a trip to California in 1968. My first trip out there. We visited San Diego, Los Angeles, and on up to Saratoga to see George and Marilyn. First trip we had ever made alone since we were married.

Later, after Daddy was gone, we made another long trip to South Dakota, Yellowstone Park, and Seattle. We saw Mount Rushmore, the harbor at Seattle and rode a ferry over to Victoria Island. It was too bad that I sprained my ankle on the ferry and could not walk much so we just toured Victoria in the pickup.

In our years since Harry retired and we sold the radio station, we have made trips only to the Childrens’ homes and other relatives. Occasionally we visited Mae Foster north of St Louis several times.

The Motor Home has made our trips much more enjoyable as we have grown older and make it easy for us to stop and rest whenever we choose. We have really enjoyed having it to travel in.