I’ve noticed that people have been posting stories about road trips. So I thought I would share a road trip story. My senior year at Dimond High had a big change in friends. The Sand Lake boys had a meltdown due to… What else, a girl. Sides were chosen and in the middle of the heat of it people moved away. My senior year was the year of the teacher strike. While sitting on the grass, in front of Dimond High, with nothing to do but play guitar and watch the teachers walk back and forth. I met a bunch of new people. From other parts of town. This gave me a whole new perspective. These new people were kids that lived over off of tutor and Arctic kinda over by Pop Carr Park. And up on the hillside and the backside of Jewel Lake. Many of these guys I already knew but due to the meltdown of my normal posse our friendship picked up. Greg Ebbert was lost in a smoke filled haze. David Ziemer had gotten dirty so his mom made them come in and take a bath. Jim Ross moved to Florida. And the Sand Lake Boys, after all those years of shenanigans, had gone from the Sand Lake Boys to the Sand Lake Guy… Me. So I started hanging with another group of guys. Chad as I said had lived over by Pop Carr Park and played guitar, we hit it off. His parents owned Liberty Glass and his older brother was the kwhl dj J.D. Chanler. Then there was Greg who played bass and lived real close to Chad. The other Greg affectionately known simply as Gumby lived on the backside of Jewel Lake and played drums. Rounding off this little ensemble was Fred a rich kid from hillside with no sense of purpose in life, but did own a rhythm guitar. (If you remember these are the guys who formed the local band called 151) Do to this line up my shenanigans took on a rock ‘n roll flair. One Saturday night we had gone up to the hillside in Chad’s green 1964 Thunderbird to get Fred. We were trying to think things to do and the only thing we were coming up with was to go and cruise the strip. None of us really wanted to do that, it was a matter of the same old same old. So we decided we would do a road trip. We stopped at a convenience store out on the old Seward Highway south of Dimond Blvd kinda in the area where the Kit Kat club used to be. We had six people in the car four guys and two girls. The guys were Chad, me, Greg, and Fred the girls were Melissa and someone else who I cant remember. (I do, but see no reason to drag her back into this) We were standing in the parking lot of a convenience store after buying some beer and munchies trying to figure out did we want to do a road trip to Fairbanks or to Seward. After some debate that in hindsight was actually nonsensical. We decided it was better for us to go to Seward. Chad’s argument was he was driving we were on the south side of town and he would have to drive through town in order to go to Fairbanks and he really didnt feel like driving through Anchorage. Which is about the stupidest excuse to not go to Fairbanks I have ever heard. There are a lot of reasons not to go to Fairbanks, (I know I was born there) having to drive through Anchorage is not one of them. Fairbanks was about 360 miles away with pretty much nothing to do once you get there. Whereas Seward was only about 125 miles away and a really cool tourist destination. But we decided to go to Seward simply because we were on the south side of town. So we fill the car gas tank up and headed towards Girdwood. Melissa and Chad who later got married were sitting in the front seats, while the rest of us sat in the back. Fortunately for me I was sitting next to the door on the passenger side with a girl wedged in between me and Greg. Fred was wedged between the driver side door and Greg. So frankly I think I had the best seat in the house. As we drove along along the winding road of the Seward Highway, after about two hours we started to climb up towards Moose Pass. This whole time we were listening and singing songs from The Cars, The Electric Light Orchestra, Queen, Aerosmith and Ozzy. We were all big Ozzy fans. We were drinking beer and eating beef jerky while we drove into the night without a care in the world. Around midnight we stopped at the parking lot at Summit Lake Lodge. We all got out stretched our legs walked around a little bit. The parking lot was covered with snow and had frozen over from all car tracks and was real crunchy and hard to walk on. So after a while we just decided to get back in the car and to continue on to Seward. More beer, and more jerky. After two hours and many songs later we started coming into Seward. At this point in time Fred who had been sleeping. Started doing something very stupid. He had rolled down his window and was smashing beer bottles on the pavement in front of oncoming traffic. And he was thinking it was the funniest thing he had ever done until Chad pointed out to him that we had to come back across that same glass on our way back to Anchorage and he needed to stop it. So we pull into Seward it’s like 5 o’clock Sunday morning and not a creature was stirring not even a mouse. We find a restaurant that is open and we have breakfast. So we sat there in a restaurant whose name I cant remember and we stared at all the people from Seward and they sat there and stared at all the people from Anchorage. When we were all done, we all piled back into the car and drove back to Anchorage. I had a real sweetheart of a girl whose name I don’t remember all snuggled up and asleep using me as a pillow all the way back to Anchorage. As I said I believe I had the best seat in the house. Sorry there were no police, state troopers, or DUIs. Nobody went to jail, just a bunch of kids having a road trip to Seward.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 03:23:01 +0000
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