From the Managing Editor, June 2022

We didn’t have money when I was a child, but mom was always able to schedule travel during summer months or even over the Christmas school break.

The way she pulled it off was to always count the pennies, taking our own food on trips, and sharing big expenses with other families who were also wanting to get away.

A week down at Edisto Beach was always scheduled along with family friends, so the costs of the beach house was divided and more manageable for everyone. On other trips, Mom would make sure family in distant places knew when we were traveling, and could they put us up for a night? Looking back, I imagine that my cousin in Little Rock, Arkansas, wasn’t exactly hoping we would be traveling to see my father’s family out in Oklahoma. Yet, if Mom called, the cousin was happy to fix up two twin beds, or a cot, so we could sleep a night there en route to avoid the expense of a motel.

For the beach trips, either to Edisto or to Fernandina Beach, Mom always started looking at the grocery newspaper ads many weeks in advance, scoping out things we could freeze and stick in the big Coleman cooler. With a lot of frozen stuff—like a big ham, or those three-pound rolls of ground beef—we didn’t need that much ice to keep refrigerated stuff cool on the trip. If hams were on sale leading up to Easter, Mom probably bought it then and put it in the freezer for the coming summer vacation.

We also didn’t stop at many restaurants on the beach trips. Interstate 26 wasn’t finished in North Carolina at that time, so we’d drive down the old two-lane road through Saluda until we could pick up a modern highway in the flatlands.

We always had to get going before dawn, and we would stop at a picnic table somewhere in South Carolina to make sandwiches—peanut butter, pimento cheese, maybe we had some boiled eggs, too—and then back in the car, always a large American station wagon, for the many hours more of driving.

Now that I am in my 60s, I can honestly say that a week passes faster today than the time it took to drive from the mountains to the ocean in the 1960s, or so it seems.

Going to Edisto was especially nerve-wracking on a kid because you had to get back on a narrow two-lane road for the last hour or so, and you couldn’t see the ocean until suddenly it was there, 50 yards in front of you. There was no early glance to give you hope that your trip was nearing its end. Coming onto Edisto Island you crossed the Intracoastal Waterway—this was back when that involved driving across a drawbridge—and that waterway wasn’t the ocean, dang it. It didn’t have the surf and the sound of the waves crashing. It was a stretch of slow water and then, again, we were just riding, riding, riding, riding.

We had to stop a few miles inland to check in at the real estate office. The adults would go in, pay the balance, collect the keys, while the kids stood around or used the bathroom, then back in the hot car to drive some more.

But then, suddenly, boom: There’s the ocean, right in front of you.

The joy of arriving at the beach was undeniable. Even if you knew the car had to be unloaded before anyone went to the surf, you smiled and laughed because of the smell of the ocean, and the heat of the day, and the gulls winging overhead, and the pleasant exploration of the accommodations.

We scoped out the bedrooms where the adults were to sleep, but the kids staked out slices of floor on the screened porch for sleeping bags. Sometimes, an older kid got the couch. Being one of the youngest, I never did.

Those summer vacations in the 1960s created memories I will always remember, and the sight of an ocean always brings them rushing back for me.