It's time for another car story.
      I love being in cars. Cars have always been a symbol of freedom for me. As a teen, I didn't really have a life away from my family, no friends and no parties. I wasn't allowed to work or get my driver's license until I was 18. I was pretty much a captive in my parent's disfunctional and often violent house. Then, on that magic 18th birthday, my life changed. I got my first job bringing in my own money and started learning to drive. I learned to drive in my dad's 1965 Plymouth Valiant. The transmission was three on the column. I loved that car. Though, I did manage to do a lot of damage to that poor car in my earlier driving years, it always pulled through.
      The day I got my license and was going on my first drive on my own, my dad insisted on guiding me down the curvy driveway. Now I had been successfully navigating that driveway for months and didn't need his help, but I knew I had better go along with it, if I wanted to take the car out that day. He kept waving me back, back, I hesitated and he said, "you have plenty of room," then “Whoa, stop! Stop!” as I hit the neighbors’ drywall sending it into their yard like a line of dominos, which would become almost a recurring theme.
      A few weeks later, I was driving around with a friend, partying in that car. There were no places to go hang out when I was a teen other than our cars or the local ice cream parlors. Obviously, we couldn’t party in the ice cream shops, so we drove around. Traveling down Frog Town Road, a particularly windy road, my friend instructed me to hold the wheel straight and lean her way for a minute to take a hit off a roach. Although I did hesitate, my attention was diverted for a few crucial moments as I leaned over, taking a good strong hit and holding the wheel straight.  Suddenly, I noticed that the car seemed to be kind of bumpy, and I was having a hard time controlling it, so I pulled into a side street and got out. I almost fell over when I saw that the whole driver’s side front fender and hood were bashed in. The reason it was bumpy was that the fender was cutting into the tire. I quickly took the tire iron out of the back and bent the bumper out enough to safely drive it back to the scene of the accident, where I discovered I had taken down a telephone pole. It was lying across the road, blocking both sides. I realized that while I was holding the wheel straight, the road had taken a curve. I quickly drove to the Dairy Queen where a few friends worked, It was also where all the gear heads hung out. That parking lot was a popular hangout. The whole gang was there, and we came up with a plan. The guys in the DQ let us use some rags and water so we could wash the creosote off. The we got to work pulling the wooden splinters out of the frame. Someone even had a rubber mallet to bend and shape the fender more so it looked like a vehicle had hit me. I concocted a story about being at Friendly’s when we heard a crash, ran out and saw a truck racing away. It was a hit and run. Of course it was moving too fast for me to see the license plate, but my dad insisterd on taking me down to the police station to file a hit and run report. As we were getting ready to leave for the station, he bent down and picked out a stray piece of wood that we had missed. I quickly remembered that the truck had a homemade wooden bumper, and off we went to file the report. That car was eventually turned over to me years later and almost made a cross-country trip. I have so many fond memories of it from two very different times in my life. I always thought it ironic that I often got in trouble for things I didn't do because of my mother's penchant for inventing transgressions that led to my dad's leather belt, but I got away with this. Years later I confessed to my dad and asked if he really believed my story. He said, "I always thought it was a little fishy.". 
      So, flash forward a few years. I now owned the car, and Paul and I were preparing to make another cross-country trip. It was 1978 and, after living back in my hometown of Stamford, Connecticut for a year and a half, we were ready to go back out west. Our friend Debbie had decided to come with us, and we planned to head out in two days with three adults and our 2 1/2-year old daughter, in that small but reliable and well-loved Valiant. I decided to drive out with my daughter to North Stamford to visit a good friend’s mother one last time and say goodbye. On the way home, the car started making a hellacious noise, then a big clunk, then rolled to a stop. I was able to roll it onto the narrow shoulder then hitched a ride home for us. Ugh! What would we do now? I called my mother, who had fingers in every pie and was everyone's friend. She garage to come get the car that afternoon and found us another, slightly bigger Valiant that afternoon. It looked like we were all set to go.
      However, the next morning, as we were packing the last of our belongings, we got a call from our friend and traveling companion. She was getting back together with her ex-boyfriend and wanted him to come along. Now that four-door sedan car would carry 4 adults and a child plus all of the belongings we could manage to cram in. We finally agreed to take him along, knowing it would be tense but also welcoming the extra financial help. I hung up the phone when the doorbell rang. At the door were two local policemen. They wanted to arrest me for leaving the scene of an accident. It takes a lot to make me break down, but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I collapsed into a puddle of tears, leaving Paul to step outside and talk to the cops.
      Apparently, the tow truck never came and overnight the car was pushed into the ravine probably by some mischievous teenagers. It crashed through the residents’ stone wall and came to a stop nose down in their river. Now the police were here to take me away. We managed to get the garage to admit their failure and, probably in no small part due to my dad’s notoriety in town and my mom’s persuasive ways, they let me go. We successfully made the not uneventful trip to Washington State with the trunk full and the floor of the back seat packed level with the seats. But that’s a story for another time. As we were packing the last few items, I removed the spare tire to make more room. This horrified my mother, who was already horrified at the prospect of us embarking on this latest adventure, taking her only grandchild with us. I assured her that it would be fine. “Don’t worry, Mom. We won’t need the tire.” And, we didn’t.

       I started preparing our new home for travel. I attached edges to  the table that stuck up above the top to keep any crayons or other toys from rolling off. It already had curtains and beds. I sewed pockets into the curtains to make drinks, snacks and other necessary items for the kids easily accessible. There were still no seatbelts or car seats at that time, but I knew I didn’t want them running all over the bus, so I had things organized to keep them occupied. I got a few toys the kids had never seen, a bunch of paint with water and other activity books, play dough, books and puzzles. We played travel games and sang songs. I had also learned by then what kinds of food traveled easily. I remember thinking that I should write a book on safe and reliable travel with children because I had already done so much of it. We left in late April and planned to travel for a week. We hadn’t considered the fact that we were traveling over a few different mountain ranges in a VW bus loaded with all our possessions, two children, two adults and a cat. As we were loading up to leave, our friend Jim came by to see us off, He walked up and handed me a jar of old barn nails of varying sizes. Jim is an eccentric, artistic vagabond. He’s an amazing artist and writer. He has always lived an unusual life as we did, and I admired him greatly. He was older than us and had been around, taking his bumps along the way. As I took the nails, I looked quizzically at him. He said, “You never know what you’ll need on the road.” I nodded and put them in our toolbox, knowing that somehow, at some time, they would come in handy. I still have a couple of those nails and the original jar, in my toolbox today.
        The first leg of our journey took us southeast toward Reno, Nevada then on to Salt Lake City. We were almost at the top of the highest mountain pass we would need to cross when our bus just stopped. We could see the summit. It was so close, but we just couldn’t get there. We jumped out of the bus around to the back to look at the engine and see if we could figure out the problem. There it was, right in front of our eyes. The two pieces of the flywheel were shifting back and forth and had widened the slot that held the two pieces together. We looked at it for a while when I remembered the jar of barn nails that Jim had given me as we were leaving. We pounded a few of the largest ones in there, but it still wasn’t quite enough. Then we noticed the leftover brake part that we had thrown into the toolbox a year earlier, not long after our left rear wheel had come off our Plymouth Valiant and passed us on the left as we rode over a narrow bridge with a logging truck headed our way. Although we had worried at the time about that missing piece, the brakes worked fine, and now that old leftover brake part fit perfectly with the nails into the leftover space in the flywheel. That unique repair took us all the way to Ohio where we replaced the faulty flywheel at a Dune Buggy Shop called “Mud, Sweat and Gears.,” And where my daughter realized that chicken and dumplings from “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” were a real thing. Ah… but those and so many more, are all their own stories for another day.