A few years ago, my wife and I went on a road trip across the southern states of the U.S.A., where routes don’t come much more iconic than the one we chose. After a few days in New Orleans, we picked up a rental car and drove west across Louisiana and Texas, then continued to join the old Route 66 in New Mexico. From there, we drove to the California coast by way of the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, finishing the trip with a drive down the Big Sur to Los Angeles.
I wasn’t driving every day, but on the days when I was behind the wheel, those long, straight highways through the plains and deserts of the old Wild West seemed endless. The scale of it all really is staggering—driving from one side of Texas to the other alone is a greater distance than Land’s End to John O’Groats (the full length of Great Britain)—but in a modern car with comfortable seats and air conditioning, it’s not too daunting. The climate was extreme too: one day we left Las Vegas in temperatures in the mid-70s. By the time we reached Death Valley, they had climbed into the mid-110s; by the time we got to our cabin in the Sierra Mountainsthat evening, the temperature had dropped below freezing.
From Route 66 to the back seat
On those long drives, I couldn’t help contrasting my experience with memories of childhood travel. Those English summer vacations were on a much smaller scale in terms of distance and extremes of climate, but the journeys themselves felt equally epic. My parents always sat in the front of the family car; my brother and I were in the back, separated by a peacekeeping wall of luggage piled between us. There was yet more luggage in the footwells, in the trunk, and on the roof rack. I’ve no idea why we needed to take so much with us for a short family vacation!
Those journeys felt long, and they were made longer because some major towns and cities still didn’t have bypasses in the 1970s, and we had to pass through congested town centers.
Ravenglass, 1976: heatwaves and melting blacktop
Our summer vacation of 1976 was a particularly memorable one. After a long journey from the south-east of England—“Are we nearly there yet?”—we eventually ended up in the lovely little seaside village of Ravenglass, on the Cumbrian coast. That summer was phenomenally hot, with hosepipe bans, reservoir levels dropping so low that the ruins of abandoned villages emerged, and one thing I particularly remember: that odd, slightly scary sensation of your feet sticking to the ground as the asphalt melted in the heat. There was always that deliciously scary moment when you would wonder if you were properly stuck this time, and then the sudden giving sensation as you pulled free.
Another of my childhood summer memories from that year is the ladybugs. There were millions of them. The unusual heat that year created perfect conditions for them to breed, and by August there were swarms of ladybugs like dark, swirling clouds in the sky and red carpets of them covering every surface. In places, you couldn’t walk without feeling the crunch of them beneath your feet, no matter how hard you tried. They loved nothing more than crawling over any exposed skin, gathering the salt from your sweat and occasionally nipping you by accident, leading to scary stories about plagues of biting ladybugs.
Our cousins and grandparents joined us on that vacation in Ravenglass, and we got to spend a lot of time with them, exploring rock pools and daring each other to race the fast-incoming tide. Any daytrips out really did require us to cram into the cars: three or four kids on the back seat (bare legs in shorts being seared by those scorching black vinyl seats that seemed to be in every car back then) and another two in the trunk of the station wagon. It would never be allowed nowadays!
Across the Atlantic: Familiar, but different
How did these family memories translate to other parts of the world, I wondered? Did American families squeeze into cars like anchovies in a tin too? The distances are so much greater in the U.S., so if they did, those really must have been uncomfortable journeys! Certainly, I can still remember the jolts and bumps of even a short journey in the trunk of a station wagon.
I also wondered how the scale affected what it was possible to do. We only lived a couple of hundred miles or so from most of our cousins and other close relatives. In the U.S., those distances might measure in the thousands, so perhaps family reunions would be less frequent and travel would be by air rather by road. That would make them more expensive too, so perhaps some families might never have those experiences of bonding with cousins.
Fast-forwarding to Route 66, I pulled over one time for a break from driving, somewhere in New Mexico, and was again thrown back into memories of my childhood. When we were kids, the roadside breaks were in pullouts or the then-ubiquitous chain of Little Chef restaurants. I particularly remember a Little Chef in the Midlands that had a dramatic cantilevered roof—it looked as if aliens had landed beside the road.
The roadside cafe I stopped at in New Mexico was a squat wooden cabin that stood out from the flat, dusty desert. The building was surrounded by giant saguaro cacti reaching for the sky, and yes, there were a few big balls of tumbleweed blowing about. Standing outside the cafe were three men wearing huge Stetsons and cowboy boots, with shiny revolvers in holsters at their waists. It was like stepping into one of those Wild West films I’d loved as a kid, except these cowboys had turned up in a giant pick-up rather than on the backs of horses.
In that moment, my musings shifted from the shared experiences across cultures—the crammed car trips, the opportunities to spend more than just a flying visit with cousins and grandparents—to just how different our experiences can be. For me, I was seeing an old cowboy movie coming to life around me, but for American kids growing up in these places, such sights must be everyday and nothing to get excited about. Would these American kids experience a similar sense of wonder if they came to Blackpool or Brighton for their summer vacation?
For me, family travel memories alternated year by year between places like Bridlington and the Yorkshire Dales and longer trips, usually to France. The packed beaches of a traditional English seaside town one year, and miles of wide-open beach in places like La Rochelle on France’s Atlantic coast the next. On my long American road trip, the most crowded beach I saw was halfway down the Big Sur, when the road took us past a beach covered in huge elephant seals, sprawling on the rocks and sand.
They say travel broadens your horizons, but it will broaden the belly too, if you’re not careful. On those French vacations, I developed a taste for French pates and cheeses and for tartes aux fraises: little tarts made from buttery pastry, filled with vanilla crème pâtissière and topped with glazed strawberries. In the British seaside towns, it was all about fish and chips—in those days still wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers—and ice creams.
What would be the equivalent in an American seaside town? By the time of my road trip, it was more about fine dining. We ate well, with meals ranging from $100 steaks to all manner of seafood, but perhaps the best meal was the cheapest one of all. At a small family-run Mexican diner on Route 66 in Arizona, we just asked our hosts to recommend things from their menu. To this day, that meal remains one of the best I’ve ever had.
I grew up on what is only half-seriously known as the Essex Riviera. You can’t get much more quintessentially English than a day by the sea at Clacton, with the pier packed full of arcades, the clatter of slot machines, the jangle of music, and the protesting squeals of kids losing at air hockey to their fathers. The closest we came to this on our road trip was Venice Beach in Los Angeles. There, shops and stalls lined up along the boardwalk, selling ice cream, cold drinks, plastic toys, and gimmicky hats and T-shirts—the U.S. equivalent of English “kiss-me-quick” seaside culture. Then there were the palm trees: Clacton has a surprising number of palm trees, adding to the unexpected similarities between the two places.
But Venice Beach was also unlike Clacton. The beach itself was a huge area of white sand, unlike Clacton’s much narrower strip. The sea was the vast perfect blue of the Pacific Ocean, rather than the mud-grey of the North Sea. And the weather, of course, was far better, although perhaps that heatwave of 1976 might have rivalled the Californian heat.
Venice Beach was the last stop on our road trip before we headed out to the airport. We were there for a couple of hours, eating ice creams and watching fitness enthusiasts flexing their toned and oiled muscles in the outdoor gyms. At one point, a ladybug landed on my arm, and instantly I was that ten-year-old in Ravenglass again, picking ladybugs from my ice cream before every bite.
From memory to memoir
These are the things that the best memoirs are made of: vivid stories of the experiences that shape us. When we talk about our childhoods, we often end up saying things like, “Oh, that was the year we went to the Lake District,” or we talk of the regular events like half-term family breaks in Blackpool. It’s when we get into the detail, though, that these stories of family summer adventures come to life: the melting tarmac, the swarms of ladybugs, the kids stuffed into the car trunk.
But it’s only when we write them down that these memories morph from transient conversations that rapidly get forgotten into something lasting. The interview process used to write a LifeBook is designed to extract the detail in these stories. What starts as a passing comment—“That was the year we went on a family vacation to the Lake District”—is queried by the interviewer, and we learn that it was a two-week family trip in the summer of 1976. As the discussion develops, the memories fill out: the heatwave, the insect swarms, the melting sidewalks, the way a simple family break was used as an opportunity to spend quality time with cousins and grandparents. The memories come flooding back, filled with details that might not have been recalled for years. In this way, that passing comment becomes a rich and complete story in its own right, one that can be shared with friends and family and passed down through the generations as a family heirloom: This is how we used to live. These are the things we did. This is what mattered to me and what shaped me. The stories of our life.
Written by Keith, LifeBook Memoirs ghostwriter
