THE LAST TRIP HOME  Copywright (c) 1995 by Dave Byter,
proliferate freely.


The last trip home convinced me that I wanted no more of Upstate
New York.  At least during the winter.

During Christmas vacation, I had driven home from the University
of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky in my 36 ponypower Volkswagon
Beetle.  The plan was to pick up Dianne at the University of
Massachusetts, spend the night at my parents in Stillwater, New
York, and then drive back to Kentucky the next day.  It wasn't
that much of a trip for someone whose idea of a good time was
twenty hours crawling around alone in Skull Cave.

But by six o'clock, I realized that we should leave for
Kentucky.  I had been starting the car every hour trying to keep
the engine warm.  It was already below zero Fahrenheit, and
getting colder.  The old Beetle had a puny 6 volt starter, which
often became a non starter in cold weather.  I knew that if we
waited any longer, I would have to build a fire under the engine
to start it.

We were off, like a hypothermic penguin.  Hitler's Revenge didn't
have much of a heater.  After a warmup of about twenty miles, the
heater managed to keep the frost melted halfway across the
windshield.  Dianne quickly got out our sleeping bags.  The lucky
passenger got to huddle in both of them.

Unfortunately, the engine never warmed up to either full heat or
to full power.  Stopping every twenty miles to scrape the frost
from the carburettor helped.  Soon we were going thirty, wide
open, and the melted area on the windshield had retreated to
within a few inches of the defroster.  The procedure all night
was for one of us to drive until too cold to hold on to the
wheel, then demand the sleeping bags.  We didn't dare stop long
enough to let the engine cool off.

By dawn, we were near Xenia Ohio.  The temperature had finally
warmed up to about ten above zero.  And with each hill we went
down, our top speed increased by a mile or two per hour.

By the time we reached Columbus, we were doing sixty and the
windshield was almost clear.  I could even warm my fingers on the
defrost vent.

By the time we reached Cincinnati, all the snow was gone from the
pavement, and some of the roadside was even clear.  And by the
time we got to the first rest stop in Kentucky, we no longer
fought over who got to cower in the sleeping bags.  The only snow
left was a few remnants of drifts.

And when we reached Lexington, Kentucky, it was springtime.  The
sun was shining, the grass was green, the birds were singing, and
the co-eds were walking around campus in shorts.

My mother said that the temperature was forty below that night.
I swore that this was my last trip home, at least in the winter.