Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Flamingo Motel, Wisconsin roadside

One of my favorite parts of road trips is seeing iconic signs, logos, and gigantic bits of the past preserved like insect legs in amber chunks washed up on the banks of the Wisla/Vitula River generations ago. The unfavorite part of family travel was carsickness in our family car (a bumpy VW Beetle) and having to throw up in a roadside ditch.  Today, thankfully, I can keep the contents of my stomach intact by keeping my eyes on the horizon and avoiding reading (maps for instance).

 My parents' favorite gas station to stop in was Mobil with the fascinating, glorious Pegasus logo.
 https://www.google.com/search?q=mobile+gas+horse+logo&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=hrrcUb6QE4qo9gTenID4DQ&ved=0CEsQsAQ&biw=1105&bih=539
My mother recorded the price per gallon (usually something like 69 cents), the mile marker on the odometer, our location and destination.  This was in a series of tiny notebooks that fit in the plam of her hand. The other things she kept written notes on were recipes in a green tinted spiral notebook, her monthly cycle on a small funeral home (or was it insurance agency?) calendar, short to do lists or what was done lists on the back of envelopes.  She said she kept charts of what her babies ate, when they nursed, etc, but she gave that to a sister-in-law and never got those back.


I always got a thrill out of seeing the Sinclair Dinosaur. 
This was on the roadside someplace in Wisconsin last fall.
Same thrill and new pang of nostalgia. 
Some of the roads from my childhood no longer exist or have been superceded by larger roads,
so it was an unexpected pleasure to catch a glimpse of the familiar green brontosaurus. 
Not sure if this fictional brontosaurus has been reclassified as apatosaurus.


The next sighting of a mythical creature deserved a closer look. 
I have long been intrigued by flamingos, choosing a beautiful print to go over
the Universal stove in our former kitchen and found pink flamingos elsewhere.
Just the faintest hint of a corner is visible in the link.


 
I asked my dear husband to pull over to get a closer look.
Let's take a good look all around from every angle.

Aha.

Glorious and pink and massive.





                                                          I loved feeling so pleasantly tiny.

All the way around.

Adjacent pool/playground.

One last look.


 But before I sign off a few more flamingo pictures closer to home amidst trumpet vines
and peeking out from behind a chair. xoxoxo.




6 comments:

Insomniac's Attic said...

They just don't make kitsch like they used to, do they? It's nice to see those icons are still around.

I remember all the little roadside attractions from our family vacations - world's largest ball of string, the magnetic hill where everything rolled uphill, houses made of pop bottles, The Enchanted Forest. I think my kids have missed out. I wonder if they'd like to do a road trip. LOL

tess said...

Wow, those attractions sound cool. Did your parents take photos/slides? A summer road trip with grown kids would be less squabbly--maybe?

Insomniac's Attic said...

There's boxes of slides downstairs... I have yet to decide whether I'm going to pack them up and move them or whether they're going in the trash.

It might be less squabbly tess, but I bet there would still be some chilly silences. ;o)

tess said...

Do save them, they'll be a great family treasure, maybe offspring can help scan them during the long winter months.

Once I found a discarded wedding album from the late 1980s. Felt sad and wondered whatever happened to the (formerly) happy couple.

Alison said...

Pretty flamingos. Love it.
I can remember writing in a log book on family trips, the speedo, fuel prices etc. I wonder if people still do that. It certainly kept me busy as a kid stuck in the car on a long trip.

tess said...

Clever of your parents to keep you occupied during car trips. We kept tallies of car colors, horses, grain silos.