There were a couple summers during my elementary years where my family would load up our minivan and head down south to meet my aunt, uncle, and their three children for a big trip to sunny South Carolina. Our destination was Myrtle Beach, located on the northern border of the State, and we were going to be staying in a penthouse. We would always leave very early in the morning, just before the sun was up for these trips, and since we were driving in separate vehicles, my dad and my uncle sprung for a pair of two-way radios so we could communicate with one another on the way down. This was still the time before GPS and MapQuest, and cell phones were just beginning to become common to have, so we were using Triple-A’s TripTickets. I remember the road map having a big streak of yellow highlighter tracing the routes from Indy all the way to the Atlantic coast. (more…)

I mentioned in my last post that after we left Niagara Falls, New York, we were heading to Ohio to finish out our vacation. As you can see from the title, the trip was practically made for me, with all of my interests (except maybe the Ninja Turtles) being explored. We went to Sea World and the National Museum of the USAF while we were there, but before I talk about those adventures, I have to talk about the hotel we stayed in.

We were staying in a Holiday Inn, but this wasn’t one of the typical-but-functional rooms you think of at chain hotels; we were staying at the Holidome. If you’ve never stayed in one, the rooms are built in a circular fashion and face an indoor pool/exercise area/arcade/picnic area.  Now, I’ve been around enough to know that many of these things are fairly common now, but to my young mind at the time this was the pinnacle of luxury (read: the coolest thing ever). We spent at least an hour of every day there at the heated pool, or in the very shallow kiddie pool. I remember I had lost a tooth at some point during the trip, and had a grand time pretending to be a whale, shooting water out of the gap in my front teeth.

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Sometime during my elementary school years, we went on a mega vacation that had us driving in our gray station wagon all the way out to Niagara Falls, New York for the first leg, and then on the return trip we would be staying in the Dayton/Columbus area of Ohio. This post will be dedicated to the the first leg of the trip, with the second part coming in the next entry. I forget when exactly this trip occurred, but it’s still one of my favorite and earliest memories of bonding with my family. This trip may have even predated the Florida trip I mentioned in my last post, as I remember watching some of the video dad took of the trip with my two sisters and I jamming in the car to Bobby Brown’s “Every Little Step.” (more…)