#Bloganuary is a month of blog prompts/questons that WordPress uses to get us bloggers off to a good start in the new year.

Day 13 – “A memorable road trip?”

I don’t enjoy road trips much these days. It takes too long.  I like to fly to far off places. Or… I like to cruise on ships through waters in far off places with all the luxuries you can think of.

I guess the most far off trip we (I, my Hubby and son) took, and actually took for several years running, was from Los Angeles, California to Albany, Oregon.  Nine hundred plus miles. In a single day. In a “Bug.”

We lived in Sun Valley, a suberb of L.A. and my husband’s family lived along the I-5 in mid Oregon. When we were first married, and for a few years, my husband had only a week’s vacation. So, early on a Saturday morning (5:30 am) we would jump in our 1963 Volkswagon “bug” and drive up I-5, stopping only for gas and food, and arrive at his parents’ home at 9:00 pm that evening. 900+ miles.

My husband had taken out the back seat and put plywood down, so our 6-week-old baby son could sleep among the luggage on a layer of quilts. (No car seats back then.)  The VW got good gas mileage, although I don’t remember what it was. After all, gasoline cost only 1.99 per gallon in the Golden State back in 1966. Parts of the highway in mid-California were still what we call today, the “old 99” but Freeway sections made for smooth driving.

Today, I will gladly travel more than15.5 hours in a Quantas or Emirates jet to Australia or Istanbul, but hey, you can watch movies, eat meals, get up and walk around, go potty, and sleep in a jet.  Not so in a VW bug in 1966.