Illinois Valley News

Perhaps because of a recent excursion to visit family in San Diego County, my thoughts turned to some of my favorite trips. Of course, riding trains, followed by Greyhound buses (so to speak), pretty much top the list.

Airplane journeys are OK, mostly because they are so much faster than driving yourself, or riding a train or bus. For example, commercial flight time from Medford to Portland to San Diego is around 3.5 hours. If we can get aboard a direct flight to LAX or Santa Ana from Medford, we“re looking at approximately 2.5 hours.

Even with me driving our car with my foot glued to the gas pedal, the one-way drive time is 18 hours from Cave Junction to Carlsbad, Calif. I was going to compare rail and bus times, but finally gave up trying to get the info online.

Anyway, one of my favorite jaunts occurred aboard a Greyhound Bus Lines Scenicruiser, when that conveyance was big and clumsy looking. Even had an actual upper deck. My cousin, Cliff, and I, perhaps 14 years old, were going from El Paso, Texas to San Diego. We scrambled aboard to claim seats on the upper deck.

We were equipped with a shoe box full of homemade chicken sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies. They were provided courtesy of my mom“s sisters, primarily Mary, Carrie and Flo. So we were ready for anything.

At our first rest stop, in New Mexico, the sky was looking grim. Cliff and I enlarged our larder with quarts of chocolate milk, and off we went. A storm hit a short time later. To this day I do not know how the bus driver navigated through it. It was raining so hard that car drivers were pulling off to the sides of the highway because visibility was so bad. It was raining so hard that water was coming through some of the seams next to our seat.

We didn“t care. We had chicken sandwiches, cookies and milk. And we were 14 with great views of the passing scenery, although with all that rain it was tough making out detail. But being well-fed, and in a fast-moving vehicle passing everything in sight, plus sharing our weird senses of humor, made it all the better.

I think it was on the same trip that we treated ourselves to double-scoop strawberry ice cream cones. That was at 3:30 in the morning at a rest stop somewhere in Arizona. When you“re young and able to take advantage of having cast-iron stomachs, why not“

OK, running out of room this week. I“ll just say that the next best trip was when Cliff and I were riding the Sunset Limited from El Paso to Los Angeles. The train underwent a derailment in the Arizona desert, and we were stuck there about a day. The derailment was not our fault. Really.

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