by Dallas Brown

Created on: April 21, 2009

One of the best ways to learn geography is to drive across it. This was made possible for my family in 1966 when my father was reassigned from Albany, Oregon, to Riverhead, on the Long Island of New York. We took our time, spending thirty days visiting friends in Missouri, family in Alabama and Tennessee, and finally making it to New York on July 31st after leaving Oregon on July 1st.

My dad, as smart as he was, bought a Rand McNally Road Atlas, and he showed me how it worked. He wanted me to keep track of where we were on the map by watching for signs and other indications of things that showed up on the maps. He showed me the first map, the two page spread of the lower 48 United States, and he explained how the entire country was nearly three thousand miles wide, from west to east.

A problem arose at one of our gas stops that first night. An attendant (during the full service days), at the gas station was handed the entire key ring by my mom to open the gas cap, which had a lock. Somehow, the key ring broke, and some keys fell into the gas entry tube, including the trunk key. We knew then we would have to get a new key made due to this loss, but on the next leg of the journey, we had a tire go flat on us. Without a key to open the trunk, my dad had everyone thinking that we might be able to pull the back seat up so that I, being a small seven year old at that time, could crawl in back and then open the trunk, or at least get the jack parts and spare tire out. It never came to that, though, when a kind stranger allowed us to use his spare tire to get into town.

That slowed us down some, and we had this little adventure in the middle of Wyoming. The next night, we ended up in Missouri, about half an hour east of Kansas City. There, we stayed with a family who I considered our best friends from our time in Okinawa when I was five and six years old. So we had only missed them for a little over a year; still, we spent about ten days there with them, and we enjoyed every minute of it. My geopgraphy lesson got put back into use that next week, especially when driving through Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee. After almost two weeks in Tennessee, we spent the last two days traveling through Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey, until we finally hit New York. I had never seen such tall buildings in all my life. I observed as my dad traced his finger across the bridge as we crossed it. He explained to me how Manhattan, which was roughly half the size of most big

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