92 Comments

That was awesome. And as an amateur harmonica player I got a particular kick out of the entry in the beginning about Tom’s playing and how holding the tin sandwich out the car window would produce better music.

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“On The Road Again,” by Willie Nelson…

“Route 66,”by Nat King Cole, Manhattan Transfer, Rolling Stones, and many more musical artists recorded Route 66. This song will never die…. Thanks Celia… Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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Celia/Dale - My family did several driving vacations back in this timeframe. No air conditioning, wind blowing in our faces, looking at heat mirages, etc. Entertainment was coloring books, games, counting the number of different state's license plates. Thanks for reviving those memories. I haven't thought about them in a long time.

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Same here, thanks for reminding me of how we passed the time.

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Asocial as I am, I will always defend that normal people sound much better in a written word format.

I happen to like great writers, although it may be the case that no real writer was ever as isolated as he would have preferred, or as pure as the readers imagine, and yet, like virologists, I still have faith in that impossible animal who is the provider of our pattern-seeking hobby.

Mundane stuff is not my primary interest, but the great pleasure of learning languages is best achieved by reading normal people and their mundanities.

The painter, the sculptor or the photographer are all more real than the writer, given the fact that anyone can write, and the words are not materially needed to write, unlike paint, marble and reality.

Still, I am very thankful when people like Dale take the time to sort out their inner world and put it into linear texts that use more words than charts or drawings.

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Thank you so much!! My father would have been so happy to see that!!

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Why are you awake though?

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I often ask myself the same thing.

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Nov 22
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There are many possible answers. Sometimes the process of elimination must be involved.

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Dale! My LIKE button worked! For the first time in like 3 months. You bring me good luck.

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I'm so glad your father made the effort to log the trip. I was just 10 years old that year, but made a similar solo journey along much of that route in 1973, St Louis to Las Vegas. Very interesting read, thank you.

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What a wonderful recollection of a bygone era. What, no Grand Canyon stop??? No souvenirs from Gallop NM? I'm still kicking myself that I did not buy that concho belt! Having my morning coffee and thinking about all the road trips that my Dad took with his buddies back in the 50's. One trip to Mexico in a '52 Ford and smuggling back a drunk parrot in the trunk and the infamous trip from Texas to Florida and ferrying to Cuba to experience the Havana high-life. Dad is 90 (sharp as a tack) and can still describe these trips in vivid detail.

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Thanks for sharing this Celia. Us "old folks" like to reminisce sometimes. My Dad took us on a similar journey, but from east to west through the Rockies to Oregon, twice, when we were under 10 years old. I myself made a solo road trip along the newer Route 66 in 1973, delivering a Chevy Impala from St Louis, to a woman in Las Vegas. However, I did not keep a journal of the next few months stuck in Vegas with no where to live. Perhaps I need to chronicle that. Today it's hard to imagine that timeline existed.

One note, I live near the rest of the old Route 66, which continued through central Illinois toward Chicago. There are locations in Springfield that still memorialize that Route.

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I would do that time travel trip, the prices seem quite reasonable. Just drop me off in Dallas, I need to fix something.

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I think I know what you would fix. That little shoot out in Dallas was the last time freedom reigned in American...I was a child at the time and I remember seeing the whole neighborhood riveted to their tv's--- so sad....

Did you see BACK TO THE FUTURE? that was a good movie...Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd--They time travel and are able to change events including bringing people back to life....

Of only this were possible....

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I was 4 but remember the adults reacting. I recomend America's Untold Stories on Rumble. They cover all the moving pieces of the whole affair. Kenedy had decided to pull the plug on Vietnam.

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What a fun read. Loved the harmonica out the window comment. Great stuff.

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In 1970, Ieft Battle Creek, Michigan with three friends in a 1965 Chevrolet Impala Super Sport.

Just outside Brazil, Indiana, the differential seized and we came to a screeching halt.

In the trunk was a home 8-Track stereo, and a complete Harley 74,broken down.

Bob, the owner, got $15 each for the car stereo, the home stereo, and the Harley and we split up into two teams of two, with plans to meet at Pioneer Park in Berdoo (San Bernadino).

My team arrived first, in two andl one half days, having left with no money at all, staying at the Downtown Ramada Inn in St Louis and a small motel somewhere in Texas.

Only one of the other team made it, their partner having been jailed for panhandling.

I had somehow got $3 together and rented a hotel room with two double beds for$2,wnd them somehow we came up with money to eat Dennys across from Pioneer Park.

I went cruising with some local kids, and when we got pulled over, I got busted as a runaway, because I was fourteen.

But even with that experience, I can't imagine road tripping from Berdoo to...Wichita?!!!

I have a road trip story that features a side trip to Wichita, and it's pretty much the opposite of interesting. In fact, it gives new meaning to the phrase "Never Again".

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about 10 years ago a friend of mine from one of the countries that the IDF is bombing now made an album. great musician but he's not a words guy so he crowdsourced the lyrics. was impressed by how many of the seemingly ordinary people in his circle were also excellent poets.

with a few exceptions (david brooks, the current new yorker crowd), writing is like any other activity. do it long enough and you get good at it. especially if your culture encourages it.

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This is precious.

5 years after this trip occurred, my parents decided, in honour of Canada's centennial, to drive to Expo '67 (in Montreal) and back, in a new Comet, with two very small girls. I was 3. I was the eldest. And we lived on the West coast of BC. And they were camping. And the car broke down every 150mi

No one kept a journal, but I remember a bit of it, and I've certainly heard stories. Mum says she

slept non-stop from Winnipeg to home.

I have a bit of an aversion to road trips now, LOL

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What a splendid read as I sit perched on a knoll boondocking just north of Patagonia, AZ. I would love to see the photos, the words with the visual. For me it’s the photos of that era. I am able to spend days looking at old photos, they draw me in. I spent hours walking the halls of the Tucson VA looking at all the photos. How much we have lost with all our modern conveniences.

Thanks, Dale. And thanks Celia

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I have been on sections of Route66 and the nostalgia is overpowering. It takes me to a time and place where "normal" and not insanity reined. It ranks high in the same emotions one gets at a short distance viewing the "swales" the wagon trains made that even after all this time are still to be seen. (depressions in the fields where routes like the Oregon Trail had migrants from large numbers of wagons that created the spaced track depressions of their wheels. Or similarly the emotional trip of melancholy one feels in abandoned pioneer graveyards, or Tombstone where one can walk the actual dirt streets that absorbed the blood from many gunfights.

It is a trip to the past, where men were men and women were women, a place and time where justice came at the end of a rope and criminals were shot down like wild rabid dogs. Such were and are memories that penetrate the mind, soul and body of those still in spirit connected to the reality of sacrifices, pain, and sorrow suffered by our forebearers.

I know a place an hour away where a man from Ireland built a log cabin, married and the couple had six children. They caught dysentery and as each died, he buried them close to the cabin child by child until all were in the ground. With him and his wife left, she died, and he buried her too.

In the grief he suffered, lonely and feeling forsaken, he gathered a few belongings, struck a match, started the cabin on fire, turned, mounted his horse and rode away never to be heard of again. If one is astutely ordered in emotion, one can feel but a small particle of his pain. My friend who is four score years old, and dying, had a distant relative who knew that Irishman as a neighbor, and after the burning of the cabin, walked to the grave sites seven in a row.

That was three generations ago and I am not sure if the graves are still there, but in spite of the time span, if one is inclined to a deep empathy, one can enter into the fellowship of the suffering of that wife and mother, and the over powering emotions of grief the lone husband and father suffered when he burned it all and walked away.

The scars on his spirit and the huge chunks torn out of his heart when he buried six children, and finally his wife, are not humanely fathomable. But that was how it was then in pioneer days. On the farms on the backroads to the nearest village, I drove a neighbor in 1979 to visit someone he knew, and on the way he indicated his boyhood home, and specific rural houses where he indicated people he had known as a boy, had died of TB. He told me that in the early morning, on a still day, as a boy, he could hear the coughing of neighbors suffering that disease and the graves at the end of the lane where it connected to the country road, where people were buried. (quarantine laws)

Who can know the trials and tribulations of the pioneers, but I have been favored in this through others whose forbearers were tragically affected. In the comprehension of such history, I feel I have been favored.

And as usual, the scriptures have a few words of instruction directly related to this story. Paraphrasing, the verse indicates to not think the former days were better than the present for one is ignorant of what he/she thinks on this score. More wisdom.

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Nov 21
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No sympathy from the religion of pieces that orders in their unholy book the murder of anyone of other religions aside from islam. And who started the rape of little girls? If some fool tries to assault me and I kick his ass where lies the blame for the fight? Why of course with the one who started it. I have sympathy but not for the perps.

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Nov 21
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Deflecting again fool. Who were the perps who started raping little girls? Why of course. Moslem males. Speaking of which I ran into a herd of moslem punks at an area TH. Nine of them. Trying to be tough guys but failed. The details do not matter. Justice at times comes along at the most convenient moment. But I digress. You are a fool. Why? Because a fool makes the same mistakes over and over and over,

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...and I always had you figured but others added to the script. You are not very popular pippet. And actually I am not rude or unkind. I just treat people like you the way you treat others including me. And nowI surmise you must be a moslem but the proof is you are starting problems again. Your problem is you are a coward, protected by hiding behind your computer and you are the kind many men would silence with a backhand across your mealy mouth. I have seen far lesser males get their asses kicked and your time is coming Hilliard. Your education has been sadly neglected peanut. You are the most cowardly fool God ever strung gut into I ever met in my life long search and failure to find where I can go to resign from the human race. Pippet in a parapet. I hope you have an insurance policy in order. You are going to need it.

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Nov 22
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Nov 22
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So now we come to the exposure of a pathetic pippet who comes and goes like a drunken dallywag back and forth from his opium pipe primed with his own visions of grandeur and fake prowess launched by a pathetic pippet with an addled brain that feeds his mouth with swill, dementry and now insanity. So if it is true that the recent link that depicts a General Buchanan spouting the same BS as you, rattling his sword about war, you fit in as the spawn of such a madmen with your BS statement, "Drop the big one, I'm ready."

You whine and moan and groan about Palestinian women and children being victims based on what? Meantime in your petty ignorance and arrogant assininity, you totally ignore the Jewish girls gang raped by your moslem brothers who then jam sharp objects up their victims" vaginal and anal areas." Thus you defend in your silence these acts in essence a true indicator of your anti Semitic hate. You speak of me being a psycho when you mimic the true example of such a thing. How so pippet? Merely by how you grandstand that the demi god pippet is ready. Did you note my reference to you needing an insurance policy a few days ago? Do you not find it odd I would preface the link by Rockpicker after my mention of an insurance policy? Of course motormouth pippet with dirt rolls between his toes would in his shallowness accuse me of threats? Well if the scenario in the link is true and it well could be with head cases like Buchanan and pippets running to and fro as they do, then I will rightly ask you if your insurance policy covers you from destruction by nukes?

But motormouth, who is the coward? It is the pea brain who in his pointing a dirty finger at me, ignores the four on his same accusing hand pointing back at him. I wonder if you ask your wife, in the words of the song by Met Tillis, if she would "come back home to the arms of a fool."

Unlike you, I do not bray like a jackass but my actions in this existence with fools like you are real. I am not a fake like you, I live where the rubber meets the road. I have done what I said, I have and am fighting a corrupt CYSTem, I am beneficient to those who need help and unlike you, my life has been one where I have defended others as well as myself as opposed to a drunken fool whose talk, like yourself is cheap. There is no other reality than that which would explain your insanity, vanity, and jealousy. Harem? Funny that you use that word. One women needing my time and help used that word last year. Another very close to me wrote her concerns that she was now toast because the number of women in my life has increased though I lost one two years ago named Sadie, mid nineties in age, who had raised a family of girls and her husband had died decades ago a short time after her last daughter was born. I added her age because liars like you tend to imagine in their wildest dreams that my closeness includes "favors." Yet that is the way of sheeple. Be critical of anyone trying to relieve problems in the lives of others. A fair number of women in my existence are elderly but that makes no sense to a fool like you who projects, deflects and lies.

The good news is that there is another here who knows me well but can verify all I say is true. But I admit I despise fakes and you are the biggest fake I ever met...Bullsh*tter best describes you. Perhaps that individual has already told key people here he has known me over 30 years. Hmmm And I am real. Would that upset your pippet lies fool? It so happens that individual has a lot of credibility and knows me well. But of course the Truth always comes out. Small world eh pippet? Might be a lot smaller than you think.

I doubt anyone in my life would call me the things you do, but recently a neighbor told me "the OPP all know your name and who you are." Why? Because I oppose their lies, injustice, bigotry, duplicity, criminality, and general ineptitude and corruption. Got the stones to do that pippet?

I despise you because you are of those who were the typeset of the cowardly bullies who caused the suicide of one of my boyhood friends who happened to be Jewish. You would fit well in the ranks of those and the ranks of others who rejected another friend of mine just because he had a curvature of the spine in response to a polio oral so called vacinne. Fools and rejects just like you were responsible for their continuing persecution and cruelty to him in grade 12 even when his mother was dying of cancer and one I will never forget who on the day the intercom order came from the principal to have Jack come to the office. As Jack got up, a cowardly cruel fool like you spoke a dirty phrase to him as he passed by another "pippet" type like you. Jack was taken to the hospital by a taxi paid for and directed by the principal in response to a doctor who was monitoring Jack's mother who called the principal to send her son right away pronto to be with her and her husband and Jack's sister in her last moments.

You are the same typeset of a son of a b****, several I have interacted with, all fitting the image of the same type that persecuted a young Jewish boy, and the fellow named Jack whose story I just told. He is now in a facility for mentally ill people, you know, the facility you need to spend some time in.

At this point, I have a clear record, but I wonder if I ever meet the fake pippet liar and coward, if I will resist the temptation to backhand him across the face. Threat? No. I am real and say what mean. But I dare say I could not do it because it would violate my father's wishes and instructions to not strike a dumb animal or a fool lost in his ignorance. Both apply to the fake pippet, self righteous liar and fool. But even at that, if I ever meet you, I will try to arrange it to be the week designated as "be kind to dumb animals."

I have hope that surely in the world of the sheeple, that there exist men, any one of who will listen to your BS, see through your phoniness, and back hand/bloody your mealy mouth.

Another mark of your insanity and arrogance is to be disrespectful to Rockpicker by your lie you are ready for the big one. I know in your fakeness you are not. But do not say that in a crowd, lest a man therein on hearing you saying you are ready for the big one, faces you, undoes his zipper, and says okay, I am ready. BTW, you seem to ASSociate with that type.

BTW the scenario in the link by Rockpicker is believable, based on the reality that in the biDUMB/ovomit ASSministration exists more of the typesets of General Buchanan. And just look at the stupid head case ASSirmative action/DIEverSH*Tty type Austin.

Keep on fake poet, the more you say, the more stupid you prove yourself to be.

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FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS by Hunter S. Thompson...another hilarious book about a road trip.

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Thanks for this...it is hilarious. Everyone needs some comic relief right now after the Trump appointments....what a sh*tstorm...btw...I am reading a very old book which is similar to your story about driving across the US ....it is called THE CAR THAT WENT ABROAD....by Albert Bigelow Paine...hilarious and wonderfully written. About driving through Europe after WWI...I love this author from my childhood. My dad read us The Hollowtree Tales when we were little...about the in fighting and squabbling of a group of animals living together in a hollow tree. Sounds very like any place anywhere. Mr. Dog functioned as the badass Gov and was always trying to wreck all the fun in the old hollow tree. You can still buy this book at Abe's used books.

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Albert Bigelow Paine (10 July 1861 - 9 April 1937) was an American author and biographer best known for his work with Mark Twain. Paine was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Committee. He spent most of his life in Europe, including France where he wrote two books about Joan of Arc. This work was so well received in France that he was awarded the title of Chevalier in the L gion d'honneur by the French government. For a time he served as an editor of St. Nicholas Magazine, a leading children's periodical of the time. He was the official biographer and literary executor for Mark Twain, and worked with him (and on his behalf after his death) on various projects. His work on Twain's unfinished story "The Mysterious Stranger" saw him combine three versions of the story into one.

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I am reading his Joan of Arc book now. What a masterpiece!

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