Vacations

While living on Grove Street, I used a week of my annual vacation for a camping trip to Kings Canyon National Park with my friend Jim Cosgrave. Such excursions had been a part of his life experience, growing up in the Fresno area. I think he was desirous of having company in a reliving of his boyhood experienced. I don’t think he had a car of his own at the time — he borrowed the rather elderly Plymouth sedan belonging to his parents.

I can’t say that the trip was one of my fonder recollections — mostly I was just along and parts of it I just endured. One of the less fond parts was an overnight hike we made, packing along sleeping bags, food, etc., over a pass of about 10,000 feet elevation and back the following day. It was probably the only time in my adult life when I went a whole week without shaving (after I had started shaving regularly) and I remember how good it felt to dispense with a week’s accumulation of whiskers.

I believe I have mentioned that during the war years I would use my vacation time for a trip back to the Midwest. I guess I needed to return to the familiar place of my early days and to be with family once again. My recollection is that I continued to do this (except for the camping trip I wrote about in the preceding paragraph) until the time of my marriage.

These trips were always by train, though by the time I had moved north to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was using the faster City of San Francisco for the trip. Instead of the 2-1/2 or 3 days on the slow Challenger, the elapsed time for the journey would be more like 36 hours. During all these trips I was never back in the Midwest really in the wintertime — the closest I ever came to experiencing the snow and cold of an Iowa winter was a year when I was back at Thanksgiving time. I dimly recall from that trip a walk out through the south forty across the stubble of a corn field after the corn had been picked.