the road tripp...1973,part two

here is the second installment of steve and bills

excellent adventure...

so on we sailed across the country.i had been keeping a log book of everyplace,town,hamlet we went thru.even included the time and date.i kept that notebook for years,finally losing track of it during my time in las vegas 15 years after the trip.out of all the things i have lost ,had stolen etc. over my lifetime,that notebook is one of the things i miss the most...

i should mention here that we had taken my 8 track tape player out of my car and installed it in the nova.we figured that would augment whatever radio reception we did or did not get on his radio.which was strictly a.m. on this trip i discovered that large parts of the country (at least at that point in time) broadcast nothing but paul harvey and various fire and brimstone religious programming.yikes ! paul harvey was ok,he was very funny and folksy.the fire and brimstone,not so much.i learned of the many different ways i was going to burn in hell.so,after about 3 minutes of that one of us would pop in a tape.now out of all the planning we had done it had somehow escaped our notice that we only had  four tapes along with us,aqualung,pink floyds mettle,machine head by deep purple and of course my fav,hendrix in the west,a bootleg of jimi's isle of wight concert recorded shortly before his death.i'll tell ya you haven't lived till you've driven cross country with only four different albums.and,a.m. radio...

we pulled into columbus ohio mid morning,and i used a pay phone to call my aunt phyliss. it took us almost two hours to find their place,where we had a great reception.there were of course several comments about my hair and it was really nice to see them all again.uncle herb,aunt phyllis,herb jr,paula and little benny.we had lunch,then dinner and we decided to spend the night there.

i said earlier that we had the novas trunk filled up.what i didn't say was that we had several cases of coors beer in there my uncle herb was very excited.as a traveling salesman type he had been out west,and was very fond of that brand.at that time,coors wasn't sold east of the rockies...so basically we had a trunk full of gold.he payed us twenty bucks for a case.so,we made a little profit on that.

i found out that night that cousin herb(jr),who was a year older than myself,and almost into his sophmore year in college had discovered pot.but he didn't really have any...except a pile of stems.so he sneaks downstairs to the kitchen and puts them in the blender to powderize them.i thought sure his folks would wake up and bust us,but no.i think that may be the only time i ever got(or maybe just thought) high from smoking stems.

the next morning we got our stuff together and hit the road.on up thru toledo,and into michigan.we were very close to our ultimate destinations.for bill,he was going to jackson where he had relatives.for me,well lansing,then clare...