My Sister, Our Kids And A Motor Home Part 3

I was really ready to leave Kentucky. I love to travel, and I love to experience and taste new things, but I was up to my eyeballs with new experiences. It was time to go to Indiana to Santa Claus Land. Yippee!
I take hundreds of pictures, but after digging and digging, I could only find one lonely picture of Melanie and Joey at Santa Claus Land. I think that Julie was standing with Rosie when she was taking the picture. In 1971 I have a picture of Rosie licking the battery in an old Brownie camera to take a flash, so I think Rosie had all the pictures. She must have sent me this one. If you look close there is a great big tree in the background that is decorated like a Christmas tree. My memory is really gray about this little amusement park. I do know that a lot of people sent Christmas cards from here so they would have a really cool postmark.
Santa Claus Land had people dressed up in costumes that amused the children. You can see that Joey isn’t quite convinced that Minnie Mouse is the real thing. The building in the back is the entrance where the parents took their little ones for the kiddy rides. We had a really good time and didn’t have to worry about the little ones getting away from us. I did spend the last of my money there. I think I may have had about two dollars and some change left when we got back in the motor home.
It was about a six or seven hour drive back to Sioux City, and that again, is a guess. Except for the Southern cooking, we had pretty much lived on minced ham sandwiches, chips and things like that. I told Rosie that I would make the last batch of minced ham sandwiches and that would get us home. Then we would have some hot food. Rosie said she would buy us all some hamburgers and I said no, that she had spent enough money as it was. We were going through a town of about ten thousand or so and we stopped at a red light to let some pedestrians cross the street. The camper had a snub nose so you could look down and see perfectly. A young teenage girl was crossing the street. In her hands she carried a sack from McDonalds and a chocolate shake . I told Rosie that that girl had no clue how lucky she was to live another day. Rosie knew what I meant and we got the giggles so bad, we missed the green light and horns started honking and that of course, got my dear sister’s dander up. She proceeded to tell the other motorists that if they had lived on minced ham sandwiches for six days they would understand. We talked about that poor girl for months and years after that. I think probably every time we had a minced ham sandwich we thought about that lucky little teenager.
On the way home all we could think about is getting home and relaxing. All of a sudden a horrible noise sounded from the back of the camper. It was so loud it sounded like an explosion. Rosie was scared to death. Here she had three little kids with her about three hundred miles from home. She told me to go outside to see if I could see what the problem was. Oh, I could see alright. The muffler had completely fallen off and had rolled down the ditch. Just as I was going to pick it up, she screamed at me, “No, No, No.” I thought she had lost her mind. She had the presence of mind to tell me that it was extremely hot and I would burn myself something fierce. We had to sit at the side of the road and let it cool off, wrap it in a towel, put it in the side of the camper and very noisily head home. We did stop to see how much it would cost to fix it but they would not take an out of town check so Rosie said, “Fine, we are going home.” That my dear readers was probably the most fun I have ever had in seven days. But that is not the best part. When Wally came to pick me up he told me he had gotten a raise. It was just a few cents an hour, but every little bit helps. How about that for a wonderful ending to an exciting story?