Travel

I grew up in the Tennessee valley of the Appalachian mountains. We are descended from Scots-Irish immigrants, and it is said that we are “mountain, stay-at-home folk.” So traveling was not very common, unless it was to visit my grandparents 90 miles away in Kentucky.  It seemed like such a long trip in the earlyl 70s, with no freeway or interstates, so on this tag I tried to capture what I saw and did as a child on that very long trip.

We played the “state” game, where you try to be the first one to find a license plate from each state, and the ABC game where we vied to be first to find all the letters of the alphabet on billboards and highway signs).  Holiday Inn and Stuckey’s were iconic in the South and the Midwest, as were Shell gas stations, so these signs were so familiar to us. I used Google Images to find the graphics, and I was lucky enough to find this postcard for the base, with words that I probably would have written in my diary:

I copied a variety of images into Libre Office Draw (free, open source software that is like Microsoft Office),  resized, printed, cut, aged, distressed, trimmed, and glazed for the final result.  I made the match book by cutting and folding and popping out the pieces with foam tape. The pin on the tag is just like the pins they would give you at the city pool, the number of which matched the basket where you had put your towel and flipflops. I loved those little pins.

Glad you could take a trip down memory lane with me!

                                                                                                                      Laura