As a child of the real recession, the depression, my growing-up years' idea of travel was visiting aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters of my grandmother, on now-Woodbine Road and Floridatown Road with my grandmother, whom I called Mama. I loved the idea of going places. Our next door neighbors, Aunt Lizzie, being the oldest of them all, and Mama were the go-to siblings of the other 13 brothers and sisters in difficult times, or even to live with from time to time. One of their widowed sisters, Aunt Susie, came to live with them. Aunt Susie had a new Ford Model A sedan, purchased by her recently deceased husband. No one else in the family but my dad could drive. So it was my dad's duty (and pleasure) to drive the widowed sisters every place they went by car. Of the three sisters, only Mama had children who were already grown and away from home; therefore, I was the only child around at that time. They took me wherever they went.
Being a political- and news-minded group, my dad's family attended many political speeches where, often, a picnic lunch was taken, and a whole day might be spent at the Floridatown park, beautiful at the time, or out in the Wallace community, maybe Chumuckla, or some other outdoor location. To hear a national political hopeful speak at the Chautauqua in DeFuniak Springs, we all loaded up in the Model A sedan to make the long trip (60 miles) to DeFuniak, the trip taking several hours into the night to get home after the speeches.
On the return trip home that night from DeFuniak Springs, tired as I was, I was happy but kept thinking I never wanted to go that far from home again. That all changed, however, when I grew up and was widowed, myself. I was fortunate and blessed to travel extensively to many places, especially in the summers after I began teaching school, even attending one summer at Cambridge University, and I had a wonderful, warm friend and travel buddy, like a sister, until her death a few years ago. Now the travel bug is somewhat waning, but not entirely as I recently went to Hawaii and then to Idaho.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: The travel bug lives long