In May 2019, Fabienne and I headed east to see The West. The target: Yellowstone National Park. The plan was to get there before school let out to avoid the crowds, and by crowds, I mean other people’s children. The plan worked. It was the first time we were able to take such a trip since Fab quit being a teacher.
Fabienne dressed for Yellowstone geysers where hot water met cold air.
Being a teacher was fine, but it meant always taking vacations during high season or taking vacations with someone else’s kids in tow. We had taken several trips to Europe the past 15 years with our own kids while chaperoning students from Clovis High School. I had a blast. Fab, not so much.
Our trip to Yellowstone was to be a classic American road trip. Fabienne hadn’t seen much of the U.S. by car, though I had been in this neck of the woods a few times since I was 9. I looked forward to showing her around. I even romanticized this kind of family tradition, but looking back on it, I don’t know why.
The ghost of George Patton haunted Funk family vacations. My dad usually had only two weeks of leave, and I mean vacation time. We were going to beat the Russians to Berlin! Except, Berlin was a campground in Zion National Park. My mom was his navigator. My brother and I were his troops. Our 10-year-old Ford was his Jeep. We were going to cram as much fun as possible into that time or help us, god.
Dad loaded up the old red-and-white two-tone with all the gear that would fit and placed the borrowed 12x12, 50-pound canvas tent in the back seat between my brother, Kevin, and me so we wouldn’t annoy each other during the march to victory. It didn’t work, but it was worth a try – “He touched me!” My dad and I could put that tent up in less than 10 minutes. He clocked it.
The Funks hit the road at five in the morning, taking Route 66 from Pasadena east toward San Bernardino. We passed through the Sunkist orange groves just east of Sierra Madre on a road that my mom referred to as having “the whoopsie-daisies,” a series of undulations in the road that made our stomachs rise and fall. Each fall was punctuated by us, screaming, “whoopsie daisy!” The car had no seat belts, so each drop would make us float off the seats. A good day was when our heads would touch the headliner. I think that only happened when my mom was driving.
At some point, we cut north over the Cajon Pass toward Barstow and onward toward Las Vegas. We always knew when my dad managed to push the car to 60 mph by the harmonic humming noise it made only at that speed. Maybe it was a feature, not a bug.
Back in the ’60s, the trip to Vegas was somewhat arduous. By today’s standards, we might as well have been driving a covered wagon. The car had no air conditioning, no power steering, no automatic transmission. If you were wearing shorts or a skirt, your thighs stuck to the plastic seat covers. For this reason, my mom packed towels or blankets, and my dad always wore long pants with cuffs. He hated jeans.
One of the many road-side stands along the way sold an air conditioner of sorts that would clip to a rolled-up car window — a cardboard box loaded with ice. It worked, kind of, but only for a few miles. Then it would just fly away.
So, we relied mostly on our car’s four–55 air conditioning system: all windows rolled down at 55 mph. If you sweated adequately, it worked. My mom didn’t.
In Baker, we stopped at a stand for some cold drinks. I remember the thermometer reading 114. We three guys ordered iced teas while my mother asked for water.
“You have to order a drink,” the counter attendant told her.
“What?”
“We don’t sell water.”
My brother and I felt the temperature rise another five degrees and believed mom was about to blow. She hadn’t seen the film “Easy Rider” so she didn’t know the proper “hippy” etiquette in getting what you want from the waitstaff. But, maybe she did the film one better.
She ordered three iced teas. She poured the first over her head. The guy behind the counter looked at her slack-jawed. The second she poured over a towel and used the dripping cloth to cover her head and shoulders. The third she drank.
It was the first time I knew that my mother didn’t sweat. She was suffering from heatstroke and was too sick to complain about not being served water.
We reached Vegas a few hours later. It was early afternoon. It was so hot, some of the temperature signs were blinking instead of showing the temperature.
My dad searched for a place where we could cool off. Every place my parents could go, my brother and I couldn’t. Vegas was just for gambling, drinking, and mobstering back then. There were no casinos with lazy river pools or indoor mega shopping centers with talking Greek statues or Venice gondolas to ride. It would still be a few years before Circus Circus debuted.
Fun fact: If you have Amazon Prime, you can rent or watch the first episode of “The Rockford Files.” The second part of that episode has a Vegas flyover to set the scene. Between today’s strip and Circus Circus, there’s nothing but desert. Watch with sound off. The dialog would make your skin crawl if you didn’t grow up during those times. It did mine, and I did.
We ended up in a movie theater and watched “Call Me Bwana,” twice. I remember it had Bob Hope and quicksand. I don’t remember Anita Ekberg.
By the time we got out, it was early evening, but still hot. We ate somewhere and got back into the car. We had to get to Zion. Patton’s orders. My parents didn’t spend money on rooms back then.
Fun fact: Did you know that Motel 6 got its name because the rooms were $6? That’s about $51 in 2020 money.
The rest of the drive was uneventful. After we arrived at our campsite in Zion, my dad and I set up the tent (I handed him the poles). He rolled out the sleeping bags and my mom went immediately to sleep. The three guys ate dinner, then sat around a campfire before calling it a day.
That’s when I looked into my dad’s eyes and said, “Dad. I think I left my glasses back in Altadena.”
That was another reason I was looking forward to this 2019 spring trip with Fabienne. In a way, it was to be my first time, too.