Tulsa, day two

After a bad hotel breakfast, processed food delivered by Sysco, we hit the road. Highway 59 down to Topeka where we picked up highway 75. There was a rail line and a song called the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. The song, by Johnny Mercer, won an Academy Award for for best original song. Rick and I did Santa Fe fifty-five years ago so we now had all three towns under our belts.

Mid-April is a grey time in Minnesota, and Michigan where Rick lives. No buds on trees or bushes and grass a dull brown. As we motored south we saw more signs of plant life, more greenery. Bright sunshine beaming down, the wide open countryside of Kansas, passing through small towns, a feeling of freedom all contributed to the joy of the moment. I’ve done it so so much and yet it never gets old. I love traveling, love being on the road. Cars, trains, ships, planes, buses, my thumb, I’ve traveled every way imaginable. I’m old enough to remember when air travel used to be fun, when passengers were treated like people rather than cattle. Now I avoid it whenever I can but unfortunately sometimes it’s a necessity. I long for the days of passenger ship travel. Rick and I luckily got to do it once.

After that summer of hitchhiking and occasional train rides in Europe we managed to score a couple of tickets on a passenger liner out of Le Havre, France, bound for New York. The Castel Felice was an Italian liner running the north Atlantic route. In the world of passenger liners she was more pedestrian than elegant. But after a summer on the road it was a luxury for us. Also, due to a lack of money we had lived on a diet that would make Weight Watchers seem like gorging. So three squares a day was next to heaven and we regained some of the weight we had lost during the course of the summer.

A brief description for those who missed out on passenger ship travel. I’m not talking the Queen Mary experience but just regular ships transporting regular people. The Castel Felice, 493 feet long, was built in 1930 for the British India Company. Her original name was the Kenya and she ran a passenger route between England and Bombay. Renamed the Hydra during WWII, she served as a troopship. Acquired by an Italian company in the 1950’s, renamed again, she sailed between Italy and Australia. By the time we boarded her she was making the North Atlantic run.

Rick and I had bought the tickets from two American women who did not want to return home by sea. Expecting two women, the ship had to make different arrangements for us. Rick and I weren’t roommates but were put in different cabins. His had two beds, mine was more cramped with four. My roommates were Italian, ship’s staff and didn’t speak English. The room was so small no more than two of us could stand in the space between the two bunk beds at the same time. The bathroom was the size of a phone booth and the sink basin was outside the door. The quarters were not so cramped or claustrophobic as a naval vessel however so I was comfortable enough. I was just happy, and excited, to be aboard. I had brief thoughts about the Titanic although it was the wrong time of the year to encounter an iceberg.

The Castel Felice could only do fourteen knots so the trip across the Atlantic would take ten days whereas the Queen Mary could do it in five or six. That was fine with me, ten days to relax. There was an excellent ship’s library and I’d stretch out on a deck chair and alternately read and stare at the ocean. I read Cannery Row on that trip, still one of the great reading experiences of my life. Then a storm hit and the ship plunged up and down in the huge swells. Seasickness prevailed among the passegners but neither Rick nor I suffered from it. There was a lounge near the bow that had a large plexiglass window. We’d sit in the lounge and watch waves break over the bow and wash across the deck, splashing water against the plexiglass. A lot better way to travel than sitting cramped in a metal tube at 35,000 feet, seeing nothing.

But I was far from an ocean now as we drove across the plains of Kansas. We were making good time, we’d be in Tulsa by midday. We were on Hwy #75 which would take us the rest of the way. Driving into Burlington, Kansas I spotted a hole in the wall Mexican restaurant. A sign reading “Tacos” hung above the door. The kind of place that has always appealed to Rick and I. Excellent tacos, and cheap. Back in our days of being cash-strapped, cheap and good was always a nice find. During the Summer of Love, driving down from San Francisco to Los Angeles, we came across a restaurant advertising all the pea soup you could eat. I thing it might have been something like Mrs. Andersen’s pea soup. Being we were skipping on average two meals a day, we took advantage. We took advantage to the point of almost OD-ing on pea soup. Our digestive systems were definitely overmatched. Took me a long time to crave pea soup again.

Heading out of Burlington there was bridge construction and a barrier across Hwy #75. There were no detour signs so we stopped at a gas station and asked directions. Again a useless exercise. All I remember is there would be a church with a tall white steeple, and we’d take a left there. The dreaded words “you can’t miss it,” were used. We missed it. We wandered around lost for a while but with some assistance from Siri found our way back to Hwy #75.

Stay tuned, next up, poetry.