My first plane trip!

With Little League out of the way, we were ready to go on our first family road trip!

As I mentioned in my previous post, my father had spent the first few weeks of the summer working for his uncle in Portland, OR. He drove up there. I remember he took a package of peanut patties with him. There were nine patties in the bag and it was going to be a three-day road trip for him. I wondered if he would eat one patty for breakfast, one patty for lunch, etc. for the next three days and that would be his entire food supply. I don't think that's what he did.

The day after the attempt to throw me to another Little League team, Mom, Loyd and I took off for Albuquerque, where we were going to fly to Portland. (For the life of me, I cannot remember the arrangements for how we got to Albuquerque. It's possible someone drove us up there, but unless that person was going to Albuquerque anyway, it would have meant eight solid hours of driving. I really do not remember how we got there. Neither does my Mom, who I called in hopes of getting an answer to this question.) We stayed overnight with one of my Dad's cousins.

The next day, we went to the airport. This was going to be the first time on a plane for Loyd and me. Mom had us take some air sickness pills when we got to the airport. I swallowed mine. Loyd chewed his. AAAHHH! It tasted terrible! He had to spend the whole time at the airport with a wet washcloth in his mouth.

On TV, I had only seen airplanes boarded from the outside. This was how I thought we were going to get on the plane. We walked down this long hallway. Then, we appeared to be in some sort of vehicle. I thought this was the shuttle that was going to take us to the plane. Somehow, I realized that we were actually on the plane.

We had assigned seats. Every row had three seats on each side. Mom decided that, since we were going to be changing planes in Denver, Loyd would get the window seat on this flight and I would get the window seat on the flight from Denver to Portland. I didn't really mind, but Loyd was asleep virtually the entire time.

We got off the plane in Denver and got on the connecting flight. This plane was much bigger, with a section in the middle. The sides had two seats in each row. The way the seats were assigned, we had two seats in the middle section and one seat on the left side. This meant that I didn't get a window seat, again. I suddenly got mad about the situation because Loyd had wasted his window seat sleeping and I never got a window seat. Even worse was that it would be 11 more years before I got on a plane again.

I guess we got in late at night. I also don't remember how we got from the airport to my great-uncle's house in Portland. I just know it wasn't Dad who picked us up. I remember going inside and walking down a long stairway to the room where we would be sleeping.

The next morning, I woke up and walked up the stairs. I saw Dad at the top. He looked different. He had grown a mustache. I don't remember this part, but Loyd did not recognize Dad with the mustache after not seeing him for more than a month. He saw Mom kissing on this guy and wondered what was going on.

Dad had been working for his uncle so he could make some extra money for our road trip, in which we went through Washington state, Canada, and back down to Southern California and Disneyland. We covered a lot of ground during that first family road trip. I'll be going into more details in the next blog post.

Looking back at this, I'm surprised by how much I remember, but also at how much of the mundane, such as getting to Albuquerque and being picked up at the airport, has vanished from my mind.