The Mayflower

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Our family vacation in 1977 was to tour the New England states in our car.

In the summer of 1977 our family took a car trip through several of the New England states. It was a great vacation, with lots of stops along the way for sight seeing and family bonding time.

I did make the trip a little more difficult on the family than it had to be, though. On the day before we were to get on the road, I went to a school friend’s birthday party. We engaged in a lot of the usual birthday party activities, but then the birthday girl’s older brother suggested that we all play touch football. Huh? A group of 10-year-old girls playing touch football in their bare feet in the near dark? Kind of weird, but we inexplicably decided it was a good idea. The problem is that touch quickly turned to tackle, and I found myself on the ground under the weight of the older brother. When my dad came to pick me up that evening at the end of the party I couldn’t put back on my shoe because my foot had swollen so.

Oh no.

The next morning we left on our trip, but I was in pain. And that pain grew over the next days. My parents finally decided that my foot needed medical attention. So when we reached Poughkeepsie, NY, we spent the day in the hospital emergency room. And I spent the rest of our journey on crutches. That made logistics more interesting, but we got through it and had a great time despite it.

I remember key moments along the trip, like seeing the replica of the Mayflower in Plymouth and visiting Mystic Seaport in Connecticut (where Dad had to hoist me on his shoulders to carry me to the car when a torrential rain started). But one of my best memories on that trip was when we were driving along one day and heard people squealing with delight while playing in a cold stream along the side of the road. We convinced Dad to stop and let us slip and slide around for a little while. It was wonderful, impromptu fun…a perfect childhood moment.

I created my layout above with October Afternoon patterned papers from the Farmhouse collection, followed this great sketch from PageMaps and am entering my page in the PageMaps sketch challenge.