It’s
only fitting that my first road trip (beyond those drives to Florida with my
parents and siblings in the 60’s) turned out to be the “ultimate”. In 1971,
soon after graduating high school, my friend Murray and I bought a 1965 Rambler
American for $500 and undertook a journey of 11,000 miles from Toronto to
Acapulco, Mexico and back. We didn’t come back together but oh what an
adventure ensued over those four months and one week.
From a helicopter flight over the Orange
Bowl in Miami we got a bird’s eye view of the field prepped for Super Bowl V.
Coupled with seeing Apollo XIV on the gantry at Cape Kennedy it allowed us to
escape our humdrum lives in Toronto to see another world.
That experience was topped three weeks
later as we visited the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston the day Apollo XIV
lifted off. Sporting long hair and scruffy clothes we were approached by a man
in a suit as we wandered the centre. We thought he was going to ask us to leave
but instead he invited us to join him in the world press theatre to watch the
lift off on a huge screen. Six months ago we sat in science class stomping our
feet and yelling “Crispy Critters!” when the teacher turned his back and now we
were witness to a world news event, history in the making.
We learned a lot on that road trip and we
learned a lot about ourselves as well. It took 7 years to patch up the
friendship after our return but it made us stronger and better friends in the
long run.
The entire journey is chronicled in my
first book Then There Was One; the Ultimate 70’s Road Trip. More information is
available on my website www.thatroadtripbook.com