This “nostalgic” piece was one of my first articles published years ago in Mississippi Magazine (June/July 2002). Not only am I sharing a piece that was written twenty years ago, but the events in the article happened 40+ years ago. So that’s a trip down memory lane within a trip down memory lane. What fun! Hope you enjoy!!!

Back when I was a kid, the biggest thrill of taking a vacation was planning where to go, what to do, and, most importantly, where to eat. Back then, we hardly ever ate out. Honestly, there weren’t that many places to go to eat. It was such a rare occasion that I remember when we did. I remember going to a steakhouse while Christmas shopping one year. I was very young. Maybe five or six. Eating out back then was a BIG DEAL.

And going on an extended vacation was no exception. There are two ways to feed the body while traveling. One is to eat out and the other is to take your food with you. Now, before you decide that I’ve gone completely off my rocker, let me tell you a little about the way it used to be.

First of all, this vacation business has just become popular within the last thirty years or so. Wealthy people have enjoyed vacations for ages, I suppose, with summer homes in the South and winter homes in the North. But, for the majority of middle class Southerners, a vacation was pretty much unheard of before the 1970’s.

When the urge to travel did hit, one thing was for sure. On the road, eating out at a restaurant was considered a luxury, not a necessity. An ice chest packed good and tight with cold drinks, milk, ham, and cheese filled the bill.

As a child, I enjoyed picnics by gurgling streams, cereal while watching early morning cartoons in a motel room, banana sandwiches, pineapple sandwiches (if you’ve never had one, try it … with mayonnaise) and store-bought snacks. And, to tell you the truth, all that ‘fast food’ was a treat to us kids who ate home-cooking twelve months out of the year.

Looking back, our family trips couldn’t have been much of a vacation for my mother, though. I remember setting up our picnic supplies once in a park in some state way up North. Daddy pumped the little gas camping stove and Mama whipped out an iron skillet and to fry chicken! How she found room for a stove in the trunk of their 1975 Chrysler New Yorker is still a mystery.

At that same picnic, we cut open a yellow-meated watermelon we’d transported from Mississippi halfway across the United States. As we finished our picnic, a man enjoying an outing with his family came over and introduced himself to Daddy. He wanted to know what we were eating. He’d never seen a watermelon with yellow fruit inside.

I’m not sure if our curious visitor got a taste of the sweet fruit that day, but he did get to take the seeds home with him. Maybe, even now, his family enjoys yellow-meated watermelons every summer.

Now, if you think traveling with my parents and eating out of the car is strange, you should have gone along with my grandparents. My cousin and I traveled to the Great Smoky Mountains on several trips with Papaw and Granny. Getting away from home was the ultimate for two teenage girls looking for excitement, not that we got away with much with our straitlaced grandfather along. But we did manage to have a lot of fun anyway.

My grandparents came through the Depression, and that generation could pinch a penny until it squealed. And about the only place my persnickety Granny would eat was Kentucky Fried Chicken. So, if Colonel Sanders didn’t invite us to eat with him, we ate what Granny took along in the car.

One year, we packed the car and Granny put a quart jar of freshly cooked butter beans on the dash. Can you imagine the torture a jar of butter beans congealing on the dash had on a couple of teenagers looking for excitement?

Several hours later, about noon, Granny decided it was time to eat. With no roadside park in either direction for miles around, Papaw just pulled over on the side of the highway, and Granny hauled out her butter beans.

My memory’s hazy, but I’m almost certain my cousin didn’t put one bean in her mouth, and if I did, it was only so that Granny’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt. We did eat the cold chicken she’d fried that morning.

We survived the butter bean trip and many more along with it. And as the years passed, Granny and Papaw ate more and more Kentucky Fried Chicken and less and less home cooked food when traveling.

As a kid, I didn’t appreciate eating out of an ice chest on vacation as much as I should have. I thought it would be much more fun to go to a “sit-down” restaurant and order food. But looking back, these are the best memories ever. Granny and Papaw have both been gone a long, long time, but to tell you the truth, I wish I could eat some of Granny’s cold butter beans just one more time.

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