Road Trip!

I wasn't aware that the first college road trip I experienced was a road trip. At least, not in the current vernacular. Basically, there was a theatre festival of sorts being held in Fort Worth, TX. Dr. W was the President of the Southwest Theatre Conference and was going to do a presentation at the event. He asked if any students wanted to take part. Chud and I both volunteered, as did four other upperclassmen. However, those of us going were not considered the cream of the crop of the Eastern New Mexico University Theatre department.

We prepared some staged poetry readings. We also performed the one-act play "The Valiant." As part of the presentation, we did the entire piece in phases. The first part was a staged reading, the second as a reading in which we did actual blocking and then we performed the ending without the scripts. We rehearsed this, but our cast was short a couple of people, so Dr. W was able to recruit some students from Vernon Community College in Texas to help us out.

The day we were supposed to leave to go to Fort Worth, we gathered in the parking lot of the Theatre. We were going in two cars. Chud and I were in my car. The other four were in a separate car. It was my understanding that the other car was going to lead and we would follow all the way to Fort Worth. We were just going to leave out of the parking lot. So, they left first and we started following them, but we got stopped by the first light and they kept going. We tried to catch up, but we couldn't find them.

Chud said we should go back to the Theatre and wait for them to come back. We waited an hour, but they did not return. I told Chud we had waited too long, but he wanted to wait longer. I just started driving.

There's a special shortcut to get to Lubbock, TX from Portales, but I didn't know where it was. The others took this shortcut, but my map did not have this road on it. We drove through Clovis, Texico and Muleshoe to get to Lubbock. About an hour down the road, I got a flat tire. Chud and I got out, and like my first day driving to college, we couldn't remove the lug nuts. There was some kind of gas station about a quarter-mile away, so I walked over there while Chud worked to get the tire off. There was someone there who was able to give us a hand, and drove me back to the car. When we arrived, Chud told me he broke one of the lug nuts off. The guy told us we needed to stop by an auto parts store to get a new set of lug nuts and then a tire store to get a new tire. We would find those in Lubbock.

We drove to Lubbock and found a parts store and bought the lug nuts. Pretty soon after, we found the tire store. We asked them to replace the lug nuts. They said they didn't do that kind of work. They would only put on the tires. However, without much argument from us, they relented and said they would put them on. Chud and I went to a nearby Taco Villa for lunch. We came back, the car was ready and we were back on the road.

We had to keep calling Dr. W with updates on our whereabouts. I had to keep putting coins in the phone booths that we stopped at along the way. (Boy, those days before cell phones and free long distance really sucked.)

At this time, I was not very good at judging distances on road maps. I thought we were just a couple of hours away. NO! WE WERE STILL AT LEAST FIVE OR SIX HOURS AWAY! AND THIS WAS IN 1982 WHEN THE NATIONAL SPEED LIMIT WAS 55 MPH! IT TOOK A LONG TIME TO GET THERE!

The good news is that we didn't have anything else bad happen along the way. The only real problem we had was that we didn't know where the Motel 6 was where we were going to be staying. However, we knew the address for the hotel where Dr. W was at. We just drove straight to downtown Fort Worth and found the hotel. When we walked in the lobby, there was Dr. W, just like when I ran into my Mom in Chicago.

Dr. W took us up to his room. Because he was the Conference President, he was booked in the Presidential Suite. This room had an upstairs and a downstairs. It had a kitchen. IT HAD A BABY GRAND PIANO! I have never been in another hotel room that was this nice.

The others in our group came to the hotel. One of them started yelling at me, "We told you we were going to stop at the convenience store. We stopped and you just kept on driving." Neither Chud nor I heard them mention anything about stopping before we were to officially set out. It was just as well anyway, because I'm pretty certain they would have been even madder to have to deal with our car problems on the way there.

We met the other two students from Vernon and practiced the play upstairs. Downstairs, Dr. W was entertaining guests who kept coming over to the room. Everyone else was just as impressed as I was. And they were LOUD! We had a hard time upstairs being able to hear ourselves. We then all went back to our motel rooms. What a letdown!

We three guys stayed in one room and the three women stayed in the other. There were two beds in our room. Chud and I shared the bed. We figured that since we were the freshmen, that was what we had to do. Interesting enough, there was no discussion of the sleeping arrangements beforehand.

The next day, we drove to the hotel. We couldn't figure out where to park, so we just parked on the street at a meter. While I paid for two hours, I had to run back out and put more money in. I came back out about 2 hours and 15 minutes later. I already got a ticket. I had to pay $5. That was a lot back then.

We did our presentation, but there weren't a lot of people who showed up for the workshop. And everyone who did show up were those who came to Dr. W's room the night before. I felt like the whole thing was a waste of time.

One funny thing happened that night. The other guy, who played the lead character in "The Valiant," started talking in his sleep. He was reciting lines from the play!

There was nothing really eventful about the rest of the conference. We got in our cars and went straight home. Nothing else spectacular happened along the way.

The one bad thing about all this is that Chud and I would never get to do another road trip by ourselves again.