by Emma Willey

Created on: January 18, 2011

Memoirs:  Freedom, On the Road

 What does freedom mean to me?   It means a lot of thing including that I am free to worship however, whenever and whenever I want to.  It means I live in a free country, to be whatever I want to be, to believe whatever I want to believe and can do whatever I want to do as long as I am above the laws of the land.  I have the freedom to come and go anywhere as I wish.

I think the time in my life when I felt freedom the most was when my husband and I retired, had a big garage sale, sold our house, and packed everything we had left into our pickup truck and trailer.  We hooked the trailer onto the back of our pickup truck and hit the road to see as much of the United Sates as we wanted to, unitl we got tired, ran out of money, or sickness took us off the road.

What a feeling of freedom that was; we had raised our family and had earned the right to go on the road to as many places as our wheels would take us.   We went first to California from Colorado where we had lived ten years.  We spent a couple months parked next to his brother in Lancaster, before out wheels turned us back to Colorado, north to South Dakota for a visit with all our relatives there.  Then from eastern South Dakota we traveled as far south as we could get to spend the winter near Harlingen, Texas.  We did a lot of fishing there and everywhere else we went in our travels.  Winter over, we traveled along the gulf coast to Biloxi, Mississippi, then north through Alabama to visit relatives there.  Then we went on to Ft. Oglethorpe, Georgia and north to Kentucky where we again visited relatives.  A side trip to Fredericksburg, Virginia to visit  a brother, then we were westward bound to Rock Springs, Wyoming where we attended our son’s wedding.

From Rock Springs, we turned our wheels farther west and ended up in Oregon, just a year later than when we had started from Colorado.  We had travelled 28,000 miles and  seen about 30 states.  We fished in most of them and always had fresh fish in our freezer.  Some days we didn’t travel very far until we saw a good fishing spot so we pulled over and parked our rig to spend a few days.   Once we only traveled five miles when that happened.  It was in Texas where we learned how to hunt for oysters instead of fishing.

We saw many attractions, tourist traps if you will, and some historic places like Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, Hoover’s grave site and many others.   We felt the freedom we had worked for all those years and decided it had been worth working for.  We now knew what freedom means.

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