Summer, 1999:

Hurray! It's that time of year again... Princess and I are planning our summer vacation. I hadn't taken a vacation in years; but now that I have a dog... well, it just seems natural.

I guess I get that from my mother; she thought nothing of packing up two kids and a dog and driving all over the country... and those were the days before interstate highways. When we had gone about 300 miles in a day, we'd start looking for a Howard Johnson's. It didn't matter to my sister or me, as long as the motel had a swimming pool.

Among our favorite sites along the way were the Burma Shave signs. I didn't even know what Burma Shave was, but I memorized many of their signs. (For you non-boomers: Burma Shave was... and still is, I guess, a brand of shaving cream. From the late 20s up to the mid 60s, they placed hundreds of sets of 4 or 5-line poems along the side of the roads, each line a couple hundred feet apart. It may sound corny today, but it was effective, different, and entertaining. They have become a classic symbol of the boomer years.) Here's a sample:

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