Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Dad and Mom Traveling (Dick and Gladys)

So we had to move Mom (Gladys) out of the house and into assisted living in August 2013. In October 2013 we decided we needed to clear out the house and sell it before some bad people took the opportunity to clear out the unoccupied house for us. In the process I acquired several hundred, maybe as many as five hundred, postcards collected by my folks during their travels. I am using these postcards to send a note to my grand-munchkins once or twice a week just to give them the old-time thrill of receiving mail and letting my daughter know what modest chores I am attempting during retirement.

Within the boxes of postcards that my mother kept is a handwritten list in my mother's beautiful script of their travels. Since I have not written anything new since my retirement in September 2012, and this will be my first post in months, I thought I'd get back in the swing of things by simply retyping my mom's list here. The list of sites is quite impressive. My folks must have loved to travel.

When looking at the dates keep in mind that I, as the last kid of three, graduated from college in 1974, and Dad retired a couple years later once I was no longer a financial drain. Also, Dad died in the fall of 1984, so the trips after that my Mom was traveling on her own or with a tour group. I will attempt to type the list exactly as Mom wrote it.

The list -

1977 Apr to May Atlanta – Fla
1977 Sep             Canada – Bob's
1978 Spring w Walt Okla – NM – Grand Canyon – Phoenix – Tuscon – el Paso – San Antonio – corpus Christie – Beaumont – Atlanta
1979 Jan & Feb     Southern Trip – SE Georgia – Gulf Coast – Florida – Mississippi
1979 Fall               Cape Breton – East Coast – Boston – NH, Maine, etc
1980                      Austin, TX – California - Atlanta
1981 Fall               Bill's (NJ) SE Coast – Tom's Thanksgiving (Atlanta)
1981?                    Canada
1982 Sept              Canada & West Coast
1983 Jan – Mar 07 Marco Island, FL
1983 June               to NJ
1983 Oct                Atlanta & NJ
1984 Jan                 Hawaii
1985 July                Minn St Paul
1985 Sept               Door County
1985 Dec                Chgo Trip
1986 Mar                Texas New Orleans
         June               Tour St Louis
         July                 Cottage NJ
         Sept                 Milw.
         Sept 10-12       Theater Trip Minn
         Sept 27            To Ark
         Dec                  Atlanta
1987 Feb/Mar           Calif
         May                  LasVegas
         Dec                  Atlanta and Gainseville GA
1988 July                   Topsail Beach, NC
1989 July                   Topsail Beach
         Xmas                Al & Joan – Bloomington
1990 July                  Topsail Beach
         Xmas               Atlanta
1991 Jan                   Florida / Nassau

The list ends with the January 1991 entry. The boxes of postcards indicate that there were many more trips that were not on Mom's list, both before and after, but there are so many of them and no way to know when they went to these places. There was a trip to Spain in there sometime and another one to Sweden. Ah well.

Ah fooey, the blog doesn't support the nicely tab-formatted list that I put in my word processor.  Drats.  I'll have to insert a bunch of spaces to neaten it up.  Her list is much prettier that this.

All for now.



2 comments:

  1. Wow. They went a LOT of places. I hope to be able to do something like that someday. In the meantime, we "vacation" for a year or two at a time at each of our homes. Y'all are getting to explore much the same way :)

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  2. That was neat to see. What Aunt Gladys also did so well was write a Christmas letter about each trip in addition to the wonderment of her grandchildren's' achievements.

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