The Road to Home

Before I get to the topic at hand I wanted to address the fact that I haven't said very much about my thoughts and emotions in my most recent posts. And there are a couple of simple reasons for that:
The first is that between 1965 and 1972 I had been through the "emotional wringer" so many times there wasn't a whole lot left - I was pretty much numb... And the second is that I was trying to take a "faith based" approach to life. You know - assume that everything happens for a reason and there's no sense in stressing over it. Just "roll with the punches" and "go with the flow". So yeah - there was a lot of chaos going on around me but I never once thought about trying to change anything... "Que sera, sera" :-)

And on to the story:

It was early afternoon by the time we finished packing up and headed out of Portland on I-80N (now I-84)... I don't recall much from that day's drive. I'm sure we must have noticed the waterfalls along the Columbia River gorge but we didn't stop. And I'm almost certain we spent the night in Baker City. (Once again, it got really cold overnight.) ... Yeah - that's not very far from Portland, but the "disintegrating tire" incident had prompted us to slow down considerably :-)

The next day we continued on I-80N through Idaho and down to Ogden, Utah. But instead of continuing across Wyoming (like we'd done on our "outbound" trip) we decided to take a more direct route to Dallas, dropping down through Salt Lake City and Provo and then taking highway 6 to highway 50 through Colorado.

Aside: There's a place on highway 6 southbound where you drop down out of the hills and you suddenly find yourself in the desert surrounded by plateaus and mesas. (It's a scene right out of a "Road Runner" cartoon)... I was completely taken by surprise. I'd had no idea that sort of terrain extended that far north from Arizona... Simply amazing...

We ended up stopping for the night in Grand Junction, Colorado. I recall that it was a really nice little town, and we stayed at a much cheaper motel than usual (we were almost broke)... And (again) it was really cold out.

Another aside: I've been trying to remember what the usual sleeping arrangements were during that trip and I'm drawing a total blank. I vaguely recall that we typically got two rooms and I think my sister Karina preferred sharing a room with me rather than her ex-husband Bernie, but we may have all shared the same room (2 beds and a cot) some of the time... Obviously nothing memorable happened :-)

In the morning we awoke hoping that (with any luck) this would be the last day of the trip - and for once we were right :-) But first we had to make it through the Rockies...
Highway 50 from Grand Junction to Pueblo was a real nail biter... I don't know if they've improved it in the 40 years since but back then it was narrow and twisty with steep drop-offs and very few guard rails. Yeah - Karina was freaking out... It seemed like we climbed forever - finally crossing the continental divide at Monarch Pass (over 11,000 feet)... Amazing view - scary drive...

Sort of an aside: Nowadays you can drive your car just about anywhere and it will run properly because the engine controller monitors the amount of oxygen in the exhaust and varies the injector pulse width to maintain an ideal air/fuel ratio. So driving at high altitudes (where there is a lot less oxygen) is not a problem - the controller compensates for it...
But carburetors don't do that. They are tuned to operate at a particular elevation and as you gain altitude the engine gets progressively richer... So as we headed up into the Rockies I had to be extremely careful with the gas pedal because if I pushed on it (or backed off) too quickly the car would backfire (loudly)... Karina was already on edge - she didn't need to hear any explosions :-)

I don't remember driving down the other side of the divide. I know that when we got to Pueblo we took I-25 south to highway 87 and headed into the Texas panhandle. And I remember stopping at a restaurant in Dalhart with the intent of having dinner, but that didn't work out... As I've mentioned before, Bernie and I both had long hair and even though the restaurant was almost completely empty we couldn't get the waitress to look at us. We sat there for about 15 minutes before finally deciding we'd have better luck in Amarillo...

I think it was around Childress that we seriously started considering stopping for the night. It was late, we were dog tired, and Dallas was still 4 hours away. But we weren't sure we could find a motel we could afford and decided to push on...

We finally got to the apartment in Addison around midnight - right where the journey had started more than 2 weeks earlier (but with an additional 8000 miles on odometer and a lot less money in the bank)...

Mom was thrilled to see us. And it was good to be home :-)