Family Vacations: Helen Chappell

Family Vacations by Helen Chappell

Certain mornings, when the light falls just so and there’s a faint smell of bacon in the air, I have a flashback to my childhood. After spending the night in a strange place, my family and I are checking out of a motel and hitting the road for another day of Family Trip.

In my memories, motels always seem to be bathed in that Edward Hopper light you get on bright cloudless mornings. And having spent the night in a motel, away from home, just added to the surreal feeling. As did grits for breakfast in some small-town café. We did a lot of traveling through the South and later all the way across country to the freshly opened Disneyland.

Back in the mid-century, motels were a big thing. First constructed along the new interstates, when more and more people started to own cars, each one had its own personality, unlike the predictability of Holiday Inns and Hilton Gardens we have today.

So, it was kind of a gamble when you needed to stop for the night because you never knew if this night’s neon sign would lure you into a den of filth and worn-out towels or an

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MSM of wonderment ~ with a pool! And the restaurants and Stuckey’s and a million tacky tourist traps! Cheap tourist crap made in Asia out of plastic, seashells, wood chips and political incorrectness. There was always row after row of some caricature to offend every race, including hillbillies. Acres and acres of this stuff. Miles of aisles of tacky little bric-a-brac dust collectors, lined up like soldiers. I also have a special fondness for Stuckey’s praline logs, so sugary you could rot your teeth just looking at. Roadside attractions with miserable-looking bears and big cats. Fireworks stands. People with no teeth. Ugly Americans from all over the country who were probably very nice in their native suburban developments, looking harsh and monstrous under

the fluorescent lighting and travel weariness.

I seem to recall, perhaps incorrectly, people with poor dental hygiene and a nasty attitude toward outsiders that even a kid could sense. The farther south you got, the worse the roads and the attitudes got. Fortunately, my father was a native of North Carolina and could speak the language, but his heart was in the history.

The new interstates just suck all the fun out of tackiness. Now you have to plan for South of the Border and the wonder of Elvis on Black Velvet; you just don’t stumble upon these wonders anymore. In fact, I know a lot of people who plan their trips just to see roadside attractions like the good old days.

I belong to a Facebook group that shares photos and information on old hotels, motels and the days of old. Neon signs are especially valued. Something else you don’t see much of anymore, those wonderful neon signs beckoning you into the Sleep EZ or the Wigwam (real teepee-shaped tourist cabins!) with garish mermaids, rocket ships, palm trees, whatever. A lot of these old motels, bypassed by the new interstates, have fallen on hard times. They have become residential Section 8 Housing, full of druggies and hookers, others deserted and desolate, others bulldozed to make way for a Walmart. It’s sad to see them go, but there may be a revival by millennials who see the retro glamour.

I first knew these motels and tourist traps because my silver

haired daddy was a Civil War maven. The War Between the States was his hobby, which makes him like about ten percent of the male population of his generation. He read about it voraciously in a huge library, collected Civil War and Civil War-related products, everything from Enfield rifles to old photos, and could be seen swooning with happiness with the latest Douglas Southall Freeman Lengths of Generals’ Beards, Vol 1, 1859-61 was released. I mean, the man just loved his Civil War stuff.

So, as far back as I can remember, about once every summer, we would pile into my mother’s

Cadillac (another story in itself) and head south. I can vaguely remember the ferry you had to take to cross the Chesapeake before the bridge ~ vaguely.

More vivid memories concern my brother and me fighting in the backseat like a pair of boxers until my mother finally had enough and put my brother in the front seat next to my father and sat in the back keeping an eye on me. We siblings were incorrigible and used to make up games where we could actively wound each other, so this was probably for the best, although I feel sorry for my mom having to sit in the back and missing the good views of all the sights.

Looking back, the sights seemed to be endless fields and shabby little towns, antebellum mansions next to some of the most appalling poverty I’d ever seen from my sheltered life. This would be punctuated by acres of carefully landscaped lawns dotted with manly statues of soldiers on both sides and signs explaining every single detail of

every single fistfight, skirmish and bloodbath that happened.

Later, I saw Matthew Brady’s graphic and horrifying photographs of the corpses and carnage of this war. Swollen rotten bodies lying in a muddy field waiting for a burial that might be weeks or months away did not impress me with any sort of heroism.

I do believe we toured every battlefield in every state. Every skirmish, every high place in the road, every place Grant went behind a tree or Stonewall Jackson changed his underwear, we stopped. While my father reverently examined every detail and every historical

marker and my mother gamely tried to be interested, my brother and I fought. Nonetheless, I guess I absorbed some of it, because I am an armchair historian. Of almost anything BUT the Civil War.

Our cross-country family vacation was more of the same, except I’d developed an interest in the ecology and wildlife of the deserts and the pools in motels. Oh, and Disneyland, which for my brother and me was like reaching the Promised Land.

When I was a grown-up and living and working in Los Angeles, I went back to Disneyland, and as an adult, I had to agree with my father’s assessment that it was an overpriced, overhyped roadside attraction.

It’s an unfortunate fact that I’ve reached the time in my life where I could be classified as an antique, and a lot of the experiences of my youth could be historical, if you looked at them in a very dim light

after a couple of drinks ~ or three.

When I was older, I drove across country a couple of times, but they were hardly family trips, unless you were a member of some semihippie commune or something, only not quite as trendy. And, of course, we camped out a lot, but there were still motels .

In my misspent youth, I did cross-country road trips, completely different from the family trips. First of all, we were college kids driving some beat-up van like something out of Scooby Doo, pretending to be adults. Or about as adult as we’re ever going to be.

On one trip to Mexico, we ac-

cidentally checked into a by-thehour motel in Villa Hermosa and couldn’t figure out why there was so much coming and going. And at that point, we were allegedly adults.

Two favorites motels stand out on those Kerouac trips: one was the Jefferson, a trucker’s motel near Chicago where the big rigs kept their engines running all night at KISS concert-sound levels to keep their freezers running. It was like trying to sleep in a war zone. Sleeping through Gettysburg might have been easier.

But the worst motel EVER is located in Winslow, Arizona. The

desk clerk looked like Ursula the Sea Witch and possessed all the warmth and charm of Cruella DeVille. The room was fake wood paneling coated with nicotine and grease. The wall-to-wall carpeting had what looked suspiciously like bloodstains, and the chenille bedspreads were almost transparent, held together with more unknown

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stains. The mattresses on the bed could have doubled as a ski slope, and I saw at least one cockroach. But the topper was the hand- lettered signs: NO COOKING ON BEDS NO IRONING ON RUG CHECK OUT TIME 11:00. AN EXTRA DAY WILL BE

CHARGED AFTER THAT.

One of our jolly crew was so freaked out she slept in the car.

These days, if and when I travel, I try to stay in decent places, whether they’re mom-and-pop motels or chains.

But yeah, I could take a retro motel tour, just for the neon signs alone.

Helen Chappell is the creator of the Sam and Hollis mystery series and the Oysterback stories, as well as The Chesapeake Book of the Dead. Under her pen names, Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline Brooks, she has published a number of historical novels.