Blame Gramma, Bugs and a 4x4

My grandmother instilled in me a general love of travel, a curiosity about how people different from my New England people lived. 

At the age of 58, she motored in her Willys from Connecticut to Mexico City to visit her perpetual-student son. Four times she did this, from 1948 to 1952, always driving alone (before there were interstates). 

Gramma always returned with wonderful stories of the people she met along the way, especially once she was into Mexico. She would stop at little villages, either for something to eat or just because she was curious. 

She told me of the ladies in one village doing their washing in big troughs — how they were so welcoming to her and how the little children all flocked around her and wanted to hold her hands. Gramma took in washing when she was at home, so she knew something of what these ladies were up against. At least she had running water, while they had to carry theirs.

She would also bring back little gifts for me, doll pottery made by villagers along the way to Mexico City, a rag doll dressed in clothes with sequins sewn in an eagle pattern on the skirt, and tiny baskets woven just like the real ones. She kept the ones she saved for herself in a glass-fronted bookcase. (My sister now has the bookcase and I have some of the souvenirs.)

 No, I didn’t go with her on these trips, but when she came back, she made the places come alive. It made me want take my own adventures when I grew up. So it’s not my fault, this love of travel.

Bugs Bunny played a part in this, too! 

It goes back to a comic book I had. It was about Bugs’ adventures in a vine-strewn jungle in Mexico’s Yucatán state, and I read it until it fell apart. He encountered stepped pyramids (not identified as Mayan in the comic book but later learned to be so by me). The landscape was so very green and leafy and viney, so beautiful. I decided then and there that my 10-year-old self would someday go see that place.

Fast-forward to me as an adult working in a welfare office in Maine. Winters were something to be endured, and one winter I just wanted out. I saw an ad for cheap vacations in Cancún, and there was an air-only option. A friend and I went. We visited a few Mayan sites and I was hooked.

The following winter I went with my 14-year-old son and visited more sites. After that, whenever I wanted to escape the cold and drear of the Maine winter, I could do so cheaply with a flight into Cancún, where I would take buses wherever I wanted to go, staying in inexpensive hotels, eating wherever and practicing my budding Spanish.

Some years ago, I saw on TV an ad in which a new Toyota made its way through a Yucatecan jungle and found a vine-covered Mayan site. It was Yaxchilán. Perhaps I will still see it someday, along with Palenque. So blame Toyota for adding fuel to the fire. 

As Bugs Bunny says, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!”

FLORENCE DRAKE

Readfield, ME