Day trips.

​My family didn’t vacation much when I was a kid. We went to Michigan when I was around four and Kentucky when I was twelve. The rest of our trips were in Indiana. 

     Many Saturdays in my youth were spent in the back seat of our parent’s car, staring at the back of mom and dad’s head. This was before the Walkman, tablets, and cell phones.

     I spent some of the time reading a book. I would hazard a guess that it was either a Conan novel or a story by Stephen King. My sister probably was reading “Old Hat, New Hat” or maybe something by Dr. Seuss. 

     I remember going to a fish market In Indianapolis. My dad bought some smoked fish that he used to buy when he was stationed in Thailand. That’s another smell I won’t forget. 

     My sister, Lisa Sutton Eckelbarger, had a scale on which she judged every town we visited. They were only worth visiting if they had a Kmart and a McDonald’s. It couldn’t be a Kmart or a McDonald’s. It had to be both. If they didn’t have both, we wasted the whole day. 

    We visited the Crystal Caverns and Marengo Cave in southern Indiana. We visited the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum north of Fort Wayne, and the Brown County State Park.  

     I’m pretty sure we visited every small town within a hundred miles and dozens more that were further away. 

      These were all day trips. We rarely spent the night any where. We’d roll back into Peru late in the afternoon, and it always felt good to be back in our home town with a Kmart and a McDonald’s. I’ll have to ask sis what scale she uses to judge towns these days since Kmart is just a memory.

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