[ponyakr]

i forgot to mention 1 of the best road trips i took in my ole goat. it was in the summer of 1970, just before i went to army basic training at fort polk, La. my ironworker apprentice (punkin) buddy had already had his basic training there, so he knew what awaited me there. i'll refer to him as rp. he suggested that we go on a nice weekend trip of some sort before i left for basic. i'd never set foot in the gulf of mexico, so i decided thats what i wanted to do. we thought about florida, but that would eat up too much time just driving there & back. so we decided on galveston, texas. it was only about a 6 hour drive. it was a real nice ride down thru a sparsely populated area of tx. there were no interstates or freeways til we got to houston. it was just a nice, wide, smooth 2-lane most of the way, with very little traffic. you know immediatly when you cross the state line, without seeing a sign, just by the vastly improved roads. i guess tx had a lot of oil money to build roads with. i remember 1 incident from the trip down. this was back in the days of the 8-track tapes. cassetts weren't available yet, & cd's hadn't even been dreamed of. quite often for any 1 of several reasons the tape would get wound around the rollers & the only way to get it out was to cut it & dig it out. this happened to us, so when rp got it loose from the player, he began to pull the tape out & let it stream out the window & behind us, back down the road. i don't know how many feet of tape was in an 8-track, but it seemed like it was flappin in the breeze for nearly 100 yards behind us. there was no traffic, so who cared? well, we finaly made it to galveston & it was like musclecar heaven. you could drive rite down the beach. cars were lined up, parked on both sides of a 2-lane "main drag" they left open for the "parade", which went on non-stop, starting just before noon til far into the nite. & there were bikini clad beach bunnies everywhere. the ole goat seemed to fit rite in, idling down the parade route, with a slite lope from the ra3 cam, & with silver paint sparkling in the 100 degree tx sun.