Homer's Travels: Travels, Day 1

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Travels, Day 1

In June of 1972 my family picked up their lives and moved. Not across town. Not to another state. We moved to a different country entirely, Guatemala. To me it could have been a whole different world.

My parents sold their business, a resort on the shores of the Lake of the Ozarks, and, after a brief stop with our families, loaded our most precious stuff into the back of a Chevy Carryall Suburban (think a prehistoric ancestor of today's SUV), hooked up the camper trailer, and hit the road. As we left my grandparents home in western Iowa, Grandma R. handed my mom a small orange travel record book. The cover simply says "TRAVELS" and my Mom wrote in the book for twenty-seven days chronicling our drive through parts of the south-west, Mexico, and Guatemala until we moved into our first home in Guatemala.

I'm going to start posting the entries, probably one or two a week, to preserve this little piece of family history. I'm not sure if they will be interesting or not but they do bring back a lot of memories for me. The only changes will be the names, which I will be removing to protect the innocent.



Date: 6-19-72
Place: Kearney, Nebraska
"Left Iowa - arrived at Minden, Nebraska about 6 pm. Visited Pioneer Village - lots of antique cars and machinery - we all enjoyed it. We stayed all night at a new 'Safari' campground in Kearney, Nebraska. Weather turned cold."


I don't remember the first day. You'd think it would have been an important day for me. I was eight years old and I was leaving everything that I knew. I suppose I was too young to grasp the significance of it all.

Note: Route on map is approximate a guess.

4 comments:

  1. Maybe you already said somewhere and I forgot, but what inspired the move?

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  2. GH: I don't think I've ever posted about it. I'll have to correct that in a future post.

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  3. I am loving this trip down memory lane. I remember G & G J talking about it so a lot is familiar to me. Keep it up -

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