It looks like paradise to me. Hot chicks in bikinis, cool looking lodgings in the Sierra mountains, a figure 8 pool with a water slide, what more could a guy have wanted in a California vacation get away back in the mid 1960's?When the bus rolled out on the last day of my week in New York City I felt a multitude of emotions, the biggest of which was probably apprehension. I was apprehensive because I knew I had only a few days left on my trip and I was dreading leaving the first ever girl who made out with me willingly and having to go back to the cultural backwater that was (and still is) Lee County, VA. But I decided to ignore the apprehension and to try to enjoy the time I had left.
From NYC we headed to Niagara Falls. I can't say I remember the drive up through New York state much because I was spending too much time kissing Cynthia and making jokes with Jeff. The time just flew by and then bam there we were at Niagara Falls. I loved it because I like being around water and because the weather was fantastic, it didn't rain on us the entire trip as I recall. Watching all that water cascade over the cliff was quite a sight, though not quite as big a sight as the sight of a pale blonde headed boy with black horn rimmed glasses stuck in the throes of puppy love chasing after a tall North Carolina gal. I'm pretty sure I didn't let her out of my sight the entire time we were off that bus.
We spent one day on the USA side and the next day they told us we were going to go into Canada and tour around for a day and a half and we'd be spending the night across the border. There was a young gal on the trip with us who was not actually a citizen, she had been born in Korea but she'd been in the US ever since she was an infant, and they said she couldn't cross the border for whatever reason they made up, it struck me as stupid but then again most of what our national governments do strikes me as stupid. Off we went, minus the Korean gal.
The biggest thing I remember about that excursion into Canada was eating at a Canadian Oddfellows lodge. We'd been stopping at lodges all during our trip and the Oddfellows and their wives would have a covered dish supper for us wherever and whenever we stopped. So as usual they met us outside the lodge and they greeted us and invited us in for a covered dish supper and we all obediently followed the grown ups on in. The second I set foot in that lodge something came over me and it was a powerful sense of deja vu. Every step I took up the stairs was familiar to me. I knew I had been there before. I remember knowing exactly how everything was going to look when we finally got upstairs and lo and behold, it looked exactly as I knew it was going to. The whole place was just as I knew it was going to be and I was more than a little freaked out. I remember telling Cynthia that I had been there before and she kind of blew me off, and not in a good way either. The longer we sat there the more familiar things became and the more positive I became that I had been there many times in the past. This incident is one of the reasons that I believe in a form of reincarnation, I'm positive that I was a Canadian Oddfellow who belonged to that lodge or the wife of a member in a previous life. I was really happy when they finally herded us out of there and back onto the bus. I was discombobulated for the rest of that night.
The rest of the trip was uneventful for me, outside of the kissing and handholding that is. I remember seeing Gettysburg and being impressed, I was a huge Civil War buff back then and I drank in the feeling and the scenery of the place while I could. It was a bittersweet time on the trip because I was finally getting to stand and see where history had been made but all the time my mind was telling me that the trip was ending soon and that I'd have to go back to Lee County to live with my crazy aunt and my horrendous cousins.
When the time came and the trip ended with us rolling into a bus station in Roanoke I saw my aunt sitting in her car waiting impatiently and along side her was her youngest son, my cousin Sam. I fought back the tears because in those days it was very not cool to cry over such things as a trip ending and leaving a girl you had grown very fond of. I did hug Cynthia tight and I kissed her so that my aunt and cousin would see me kissing her. We exchanged addresses and we promised that we keep in touch and we'd see each other again some day. As soon as I got in the car and Aunt Rageaholic backed out of the parking lot I knew that'd be the last time I ever saw Cynthia.
I was pretty silent as we drove back to Lee County because I was too busy replaying all the great times I had just had over in my head. I was remembering sightseeing in Washington DC, going to Johns Hopkins to hear a lecture, driving through Philadelphia and eating ice cream near the Liberty Bell, being at the UN, walking the streets of NY unchaperoned, cracking jokes with Jeff, and being with Cynthia. Aunt Rageaholic tried to get me to tell her and Sam about the trip but I clammed up and just looked out the window as we drove those 5 hours back to Jonesville.
Cynthia and I exchanged a few letters and a card or two but after Halloween of that year our communication stopped. I've often wondered what became of her and I hope she has had a good life that's been chock full of people who love her. I hope she met and married a great guy and that she had a fulfilling career and kids and a happy marriage. I'll never forget her, unless I get Alzheimer's, and if that's the case then I'll forget everyone eventually, or what we shared for those few weeks during the summer I went to the United Nations.
My buddy Jeff Tyree and I never kept in touch but he did come back in to my life, kind of, later. It turns out he became a huge pothead and he and my first college roommate, who was from Lynchburg, VA, used to get stoned together all the time. But after my freshman year my pothead roommate never came back to King so I never found out what became of Jeff. I suppose he finally stopped smoking weed and he got his shit together and made something of himself.
(Read part one here and part two is here in case you missed either part.)
I remember thinking, "Who would be dumb enough to shell out all that money to go see a bunch of guys who are not the Beatles sing Beatles songs?" But sure enough there were people dumb enough to go do that, just like in a few years people would be dumb enough to put down their hard earned cash so they could go see Starlight Express.
The people who sponsored the trip wanted us all to meet and hang out with kids from different states when we were in NYC so I had to room with a guy from Louisiana. He wasn't really my idea of a great roommate, he was a shade thick and he constantly complained about how much he hated New York and being around all those "Yankees." I finally told him that I loved the place and that if I could I'd live there all the time and could he please shut up or keep his complaints to himself.
Since I had a provincial dullard for a roommate and I had a gal who let me kiss on her and hold her hand, I ditched him when ever I could so I could hang with Cynthia and my friends Jeff and Heidi. We were an inseparable foursome that week, if we could manage it we would all eat together, sit together on the buses, sight see together, and attend all the UN functions together.
The focus of the trip was spending time in and learning about the United Nations and we spent most every day of that week in New York doing just that. We took tours of various parts of the building, heard lectures on UN related things, and we got to sit in the big conference room where they had all the names of the countries on the many desks. I got to sit at the Outer Mongolia desk, I was stoked. One day at the end of a lecture on economic theory by a Japanese diplomat they decided to let us ask questions. Some dude raised his hand and he asked if the diplomat thought that Japan and the US would ever get into another war. I could see the color drain from all the chaperone's faces when that kid asked his question and as the diplomat was laughing off the question but still trying to answer it I saw one of the chaperones leading the kid who asked the question out of the room by his ear. I took me a minute to make out who it was they were leading out, it was, wait for it, wait for it, my roommate from Louisiana. I never said anything to him about it, I figured he had suffered enough and that everyone else was going to make fun of him and I also thought that if he heard me making fun of him he might smother me or something in my sleep.
It was not all lectures and UN tours that week, we got to go on many sightseeing trips and we even went to a Broadway show. We got to see and go up in the Statue of Liberty, in those days I had no fear of heights and I remember loving the view from her crown. 
We got to see the Empire State building, in those days it was still a big deal. We went on trips to Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Saks. The Broadway play they took some of us to was The Wiz, others went to see Doug Henning's magic act on Broadway, and we had the worst seats in the house but I didn't give a shit, I was seeing a Broadway musical! We also got to go to Radio City Musical Hall where we got to see the Rockettes and some shitty boxing kangaroo movie starring Elliot Gould, during which young Cynthia grabbed my hand while I was kissing her and put it inside her blouse. Needless to say I was in heaven in the dark of Radio City Music Hall for a few minutes.
All in all it was a great and glorious week. I can still remember the sounds, the sights, the weather, how the food tasted, in short most everything about that trip. I remember how cool, temperature wise that is, and dark the hotel lobby was. I remember thinking how cool it was that the hotel had a mezzanine and that the sodas in the drink machines were the outlandish price of 75 cents each, I was used to 25 cent sodas. I can remember how the elevator smelled and how funny it was to see all us kids sitcking our heads out of the windows so we could talk back and forth without the adults hearing us.
When Friday rolled around I was sad to be leaving New York and all the friends from Nebraska, Maine, and Louisiana that I had made behind but I was also excited because us kids from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina were going to go to Niagra Falls and on into Canada and then swing back down through Gettysburg before heading back to Virginia. I still had another week of being with Cynthia and Jeff and Heidi and another week of not being around my awful cousins and crazy aunt.
To be continued...
