"Meltdown" Our First Family Car, The Escort

Since so many of our shared experiences were in our cars, I thought I would talk about some of our adventures in them. The first car we had as a family of four was a two toned blue Ford Escort. We took it north in 1985 for a vacation to visit family and so they could meet you. We stopped in Ocean Grove, NJ to visit my father's sister Aunt Doris and spend a day on the beach. Then we continued north to Connecticut to see Aunt Jane and Uncle Bob. Then we went on to Massachusetts where we left the car behind and took the ferry to Nantucket. We rode bikes there, with you in a child seat behind me. Nantucket was where you took your first steps! On the way back to Florida, we picked up your cousin Lindsay in New Jersey. As we went further south it got hotter. One brutally hot day we stopped in Charleston, South Carolina. We did some sightseeing in the historic portion of the city. With five of us in the Escort space was at a premium. There was a shelf behind the backseat and that was the spot for each of your prized possessions, your Cabbage Patch Kid dolls. In the heat of the parked car, while we were sightseeing, the faces on the dolls start to melt. The real meltdown occurred when you all saw the melted faces! Thanks goodness once we got the car going and blasted the air conditioning, it cooled everything down and the faces on the dolls returned to normal. We also had a second vehicle to the Escort. It was a 150 cc Honda motorcycle, which I used to commute back and forth from the high school. It was only a few miles each way. I would like a motorcycle now, but mom does not think it is a good idea. I'm sure we had other adventures with the Escort. It didn't always start, which made any trip an adventure. I also ran out of gas once and Allison and I were forced to walk a little ways which I told her was an "adventure". After which I would always ask her if she wanted to have an "adventure" with me to which she promptly replied, "No."

The picture above shows the Escort, after our last long trip in it, up from Florida, parked in the driveway of the home we were building in Ohio at 2624 Woodbluff Lane. You might want go back to the earlier entry "The Roof Rack" as I added more stories of that Plymouth Voyager.