Wednesday, June 6, 2012

The Winnebago Stories

I am a road tripper.  My siblings are road trippers.  My parents are road trippers.  We might not be if not for my mother's parents.  In the post-war years my maternal grandparents embraced the open road with all the optimism that a young family could have.  My grandmother was from Oklahoma so trips to the plains were an annual occurrence.  When the Worlds Fair came to New York in 1964 all 7 kids were packed up in the station wagon and they headed to Queens.  They even road tripped to Mexico.

The open road was certainly a romantic notion for my mother.  The farthest my father had ever been from Chicago was Ohio until he married my mom.  When my folks got hitched they hit the road for their honeymoon in their '65 Ford Galaxie.  The two of them saved their pennies and later bought a window van.  During the height of the 70's muscle car era when my dad's friends were buying Mustangs and Corvettes my parents bought a tan Ford Econoline with nothing inside but two seats.  They would transform it into their ultimate road trip machine complete with a bed, refrigerator and a two burner stove.  With friends redistributed all over the country due to wartime service they had no shortage of destinations.  The miles piled on.

The New Ford In the Badlands

As they built on to the family the bed became a convertible bench with seat belts.  Driver's and passenger seats got upgraded to captain's chairs that swiveled and folded flat for my sister and I to sleep on.   The van would get a ton of TLC one winter as it lay in pieces in my uncle's garage as Dad  rebuilt the engine and patched up some rusty panels.  The following summer all of Dad's hard work paid off on the drive to California.  The grandaddy of all road trips.  Three weeks were spent on the road as we saw the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and Disneyland.  By this time the family had grown to the six of us.  A double hammock was fashioned as my big sister and I had outgrown the front seats and relinquished them to our younger siblings.

With an aunt firmly rooted in Colorado Springs and an uncle in the Air Force stationed around the eastern United States we spent most summers alternating between visiting one or the other.  Stopping to see the sights in between.  Most years the Ford ran like a song, just an occasional flat tire or blowout.  There was a bad alternator once and a bad radiator another trip.  But for the most part it was a faithful steed.  The 90's came along with children in their teenage years and the Ford was sent to the crusher.  My parents made the plunge to buy a Winnebago.  They decided on a LeSharo model that looked like the size of a van but you could stand up in it.  Deluxe for sure.

The Riley Mobile in Virginia
At some point before kids my parents went to Disney World and camped at the resort campground.  With Campers idyllically parked all around them a seed was planted to one day come back with a Camper full of kids.  This is what the Winnebago was all about.  Having spent all their money on the new machine, the big trip would have to wait.  We stuck to the staples of Colorado and the East or we stayed nearby and saw the Midwest.  Big Bone Lick State Park in Kentucky became a favorite.  We got as far south as Georgia once.  But the Florida trip kept getting pushed back not that us kids were any the wiser.  The road had firmly taken the hold of us too and we didn't care where the destination was.  Our lives were altered for two weeks out of the year.   Our friends were not missed.  My shitty grades and looming summer school weren't a thought.  Being on vacation was all that mattered.   To this day I can't remember a single argument we ever had on a vacation.  Those trips always felt like an adventure where cooperation was important for a successful trip.   The "adventure" was amped up once the Winnebago was brought into the equation.

The French engine that made up the camper was not as sound as the V8 from Detroit.  It became apparent when we took the camper up a Colorado switchback to the top of some mountain peak that the machine had its limitations.  The motor labored as we crawled up the peak with a line of cars behind it.  The foreign fuel sipping engine barely had the horsepower to get us to the top.  Dad was white-knuckled the entire time.  It was a real possibility that the power to weight ratio would top out and we would be a sitting duck with a mile of cars behind us.  We did make it to the top and once the blood pressure was back to normal we drove back down.    It might have been less arduous had we hiked up.  The view was not as enjoyed as it should have been and yet the real adventure was yet to come.  We took the southern route back to Illinois on I-70 through Kansas.  Little did we know that we would see more of the Sunflower State than we bargained for.  In the middle of the heartland the the Winnebago spit out the serpentine belt and we rolled to a stop in front of the only house we had seen for miles.  (My mother would later say that the camper was always polite when it broke down: always on the way home and as conveniently as possible, and God bless Dad who had to deal with all those random mechanics)  This would be the first time we spent the night stranded in the camper.  In the morning the local tow truck came to drag us to town.  Unfortunately the small town hook was no match and we quickly broke the boom and had to wait for a heavy duty machine to come.  The local mechanic shop was next door to a cattle auction so Mom, never missing an opportunity,  took us to the all under the tent and with her best mom voice told us all to sit on our hands "we are NOT going home with a cow".  Talk about your "Not for Tourist Guide" it was the real Kansas full of real ranchers and the auctioneer had a motor mouth that would have shut up the Mini Machines guy.  As I remember the belt took some hunting down and we ended up with a replacement that was not exact but would get us home.

Plenty of trips came and went with nothing forcing us off the road.  Weekend trips to Michigan, and day trips to the beach along with youth football games were the Winnebago's unsung hero moments.  When your stuck at a freezing football game after your game is over but you have to wait for your sister to finish cheer leading for the second game, the shelter of the camper could not be beat.  The ability to enjoy a camp fire and then sleep in air conditioning in the humid south was another shining moment.

The next time the family had to spend the night stranded in the camper was years later in Pennsylvania.  We spent the whole trip with a loud muffler and, again, on the way home driving through the night, the camper started loosing power and we crawled to a stop.  Dad lifted the hood in an unpopulated stretch of road under a pitch black sky lit up only by the stars above.  It was so dark that in the engine bay you could see the glowing red of the cast iron exhaust manifold.  What the hell do you do in the middle of the night on the shoulder of the expressway with major engine failure?  We slept and waited.  There is truly nothing more unnerving than being stranded on the side of the road rocking back and forth with every passing semi truck.  After a while a state trooper came along and radioed for a tow truck to take us to town where we spent the night waiting for the mechanic to open the bay doors in the morning.  The shop we were dropped at was run by Appalachian Good Ol' Boys whose bathroom was plastered floor to ceiling with nudie pinups.  For some reason water went through me like a zipline in a Costa Rica Rainforest.

This shop really had no business working on anything that couldn't be fixed with a coffee can and a hose clamp.  It was quickly realized we needed a rental car to go home.  Their entire road tripping career my parents never had a casualty before.  We were going home a man down and it took its toll on my folks.  They were not pleased with the situation at all, divided in how to handle it we spent the night in the wounded camper waiting for a rental car to be delivered the next day.  It was a somber drive home.  The next weekend my parents rented a U-Haul with a trailer and brought back the rental planning to drag the camper back to our trusted mechanic back home.   Some how the plan was altered and the Good Ol' Boys kept the camper another week or so and fixed it.  The Riley Mobile came home under its own power a few weeks later.  However much like any wounded soldier it was never really the same.  It would never leave the Midwest again.

The late nineties were a boom time and my parents finally were able to put away some money to hit the road to that magical place in the swamps of the Orange State.  The Rileys were Florida bound and we were practically adults at this point.  My older sister and I were in college and in fact would not be along for the whole trip.  She would fly out to meet us in Orlando and I would fly back with her.  The Camper would be given one last chance.  I think we all wanted it so bad that we just had to try.  After all we had been driving it around town, it was like taking it to the store and back...but nonstop...and all at once.  Where we broke down you could have still listened to Chicago radio stations.  The final defeat.  It was towed back to the South Suburbs and we transferred everything to the car.  You could say we got back to basics.  When my Mom was that age she road tripped Mexico in a car without air conditioning.  In that respect we were still cruising in style.  We arrived without any lost time and when it was all said and done my parents took every single one of their kids on a trip that was 25 years in the making.        

The Winnebago is still parked on a concrete slab behind the garage.  It enjoyed a retirement as a hostel when we made international friends in college.  My parents still road trip albeit behind the wheel of a Pontiac Grand Prix these days, but they don't have a van load of kids either.  Just like how they started.  My older sister and younger brother both have families of their own and are extremely accomplished road trippers.  My youngest sister has taken some epic cross country trips, again visiting friends dispersed throughout the country due to wartime service and I'll hit the road on a moments notice with just about anybody because there is just something romantic about the road.