Dad pulled our station wagon up to the hotel, we hopped out and started to explore.
“Watch yourselves. There’s probably rattlesnakes and ghosts and stuff.”
Ghosts? Wow, we thought. Jennie took the lead.
“I bet there’s a old player-piano somewhere around here.”
All we found were rusted cans and old bed springs.
“You think the painted ladies bounced around on these?”
A dry wind blew through shredded curtains, moth-eaten to look like lace.
“Maybe they stashed their nest eggs under the floorboards?”
Jennie spied something shiny and reached through the gap.
“I’ve almost got it. Just a little bit further.”
The ghost town has one more ghost, now.
Dad wrecked the station wagon driving home drunk one night.
He stumbled away, turned and watched it burn.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
The poor dad–all that guilt. Short, but high impact piece!
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Man, what a terrible dad, leaving all that carnage in his wake.
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Great. Now I want to go on a road trip with no destination…
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My dad’s favorite, almost every year, was dragging us and his camera to New Mexico and Colorado ghost towns. Way off the path ghost towns. Mining shacks and line shacks. Broken bottles and no shit player pianos. I like the Twentieth Century remnants. Dead malls, used to be amusement parks, abandoned “historical” sites. I spent years on the two lanes. I wanted to publish a coffee table book of all the dead homesteads, barns, churches and rail cars with trees and weeds growing in them. I was going to call it “Where Dreams Go to Die”, or some such. Dead dreams. Dream graveyard. Anyway…
Poor kid. Never stick your hand where you can’t see. Or set your baby at the foot of a dead tree. Might just be a copperhead nest in there. My fave? Swimming in old quarries. One guy doin the “Hey fellas, watch ‘is” jumped in. When they finally dredged him out, he had over 400 puncture wounds. His friends said it looked like the water was boiling.
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East coast for us; Maine to Florida, starting in Virginia. The CountrySquire was the first car I drove to 100mph, backwoods blacktop in Delaware. Lady Luck and I are like that ||.
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Speed and stupid but lucky car junk is a whole topic. But when I had my learner’s permit I drove the vacation. Mountain passes, monsoons, dirt, ruts, logging roads. Back to speeding in station wagons… oh yeah. Rite of passage, huh?
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I’ve been on family vacations like that!
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