2021 – CORRECTING THE PREVIOUS POST
(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on July 26, 2021)
If only I had waited a week………….
I just came across the answers to most of my fogginess about this trip from none other than the Queen of Details herself – my mother, who wrote about EVERYTHING going on in her life (plus all birthdays, anniversaries, dog sneezes – you name it – of everyone SHE knew) in her DailyAide book.
You wanna know anything that happened in our lives in 1958? It’s all here:
These daily planner books were about an inch-and-a-half thick when she bought them and 2-3” thick when the year was over because she crammed them with newspaper clippings and god-knows-what-else.
I think if she knew that the news clippings would turn every page they touched an ugly brown, she would have added two pieces of Saran Wrap to each to prevent them from touching the pages.
Note: I scanned the pages all in B&W to make them more readable.
ANYWAY……………I went straight to August. The vacation started on the 16th, but the entries began on August 1, when her youngest sister volunteered to take care of my 8-month-old brother during the vacation. “What a gal!”, wrote Mom.
August 16 – And so it begins! You wanna know departure and arrival times, how many miles we drove, where we went and where we spent the night (not to mention how many beds/cots our family of four had each night)?
It’s all here:
The main difference between this and what I wrote is that we apparently DID go to Howe Caverns.
Hey! She forgot Chase’s Restaurant!
August 17 – But she would NEVER forget Sunday Mass! Looks like I had the Cooperstown sequence reversed. An hour and 10 minutes at Indian Totem Village? Must have been a real exciting place. The Christopher Motel was the following night (and Mom misspelled “Seneca”? Unheard of!). And “two beds” for the 4 of us on 3 of the last 4 nights?
August 18 – The night light display at the Falls sounds vaguely familiar……….
August 19 – I guessed incorrectly about the Rainbow Bridge receipt. It’s from when we entered Canada – not exited. Kingston is not close to Niagara Falls (a little more than the toe dabble I previously mentioned), so we apparently did a lot more driving than I thought in Canada. What? No brochure from the Evergreen Motel Cabin?
August 20 – I thought we went to both Adventure Town and Ausable Chasm the same day, so the vacation was actually a day longer than I thought. “Beach-n-Lawn Motel”? I’d like to see what THAT brochure looked like, but there’s nothing online about a motel with that name (though I DID find a “Town-n-Beach Motel” listing there).
August 21 – Ausable Chasm – a fitting grand finale. By the way: “wall clock as T.U.” refers to a thank you gift to my aunt for taking care of my brother, Ed, while we were away.
So – overall – I don’t think my sleuthing was too far off, given what little detail was available when I wrote it up. But now – with details up the wazoo – it’s as Mom would have wanted it.
Frankly, if I knew all this stuff beforehand, I think it might have ended up being a bit too straightforward (i.e., boring).
So let’s end this with only a semi-boring fact, courtesy of Mom and a calculator.
Total trip driving distance: 1,309.8 miles! (Yes – she calculated it to the tenth of a mile!)
What a gal!
Wow, your mom was into details! She would have been great on Instagram if she was around for it! You know she would have posted photos of every little thing, especially on vacations.
Love it Bob! Her handwriting is so much like my Mom’s who wrote in a similar way. When I found out I was pregnant, my mom wrote about every day up to his birth. The only thing I can compare to was writing on calendars the days events. Doug especially likes to look back on them. Haven’t done that in years now. I think it was a way to try to capture the day and memory since time goes so fast…especially at our age! Enjoyed this too!
Handwriting is just like my grandmas!