Pizza For Thanksgiving & Other Improbabilities

Yes, I did have pizza for Thanksgiving many years ago. It seemed like a perfectly logical thing to do in 1976 but I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning and you might need an atlas to follow along.

I was attending college at Murray State in Kentucky when I decided to visit Billy Lees - a New Jersey friend who was at Colorado State in Fort Collins. Lacking reliable transportation, I checked the ride share bulletin board at school.

Someone was looking for riders to Colorado Springs for only $20. It seemed like a good idea to this naive 19 year-old and I could just hitch hike from Limon to Fort Collins.

So – I packed into a small Datsun sedan with three strangers on the Friday before Thanksgiving and headed north and west. It was a smooth start for the 1,050 mile trip that included a breakdown, a snowstorm, Mexican food and an unlikely meeting at a Tennessee roadhouse. Let’s continue.

I spent the first leg of the trip making polite conversation with a sorority girl who was heading home to Colorado Springs for the holidays. She was asleep before we hit St. Louis. The other passenger was a guy from Louisville who planned to meet friends for an impromptu ski trip at Copper Mountain. The driver, who looked to be in his late twenties, was a whole different story.
I caught the front seat just as we hit Kansas and learned that he had served in the US Army in Viet Nam and was then stationed nearby at Fort Leavenworth. The subject of his ex-wife was breached and he ranted from Topeka to Junction City about her getting the kids in the settlement.

He finally cooled down when we realized that our headlights were fading fast. Somewhere along I-70 near Salinas we lost them completely and pulled into a rest area with a dead alternator. If we waited 90 minutes til sunrise and jumped the car, we could drive through to Colorado Springs without turning off the engine.

I was surprised how desolate Limon seemed when he offered to drop me off. Instead I chose to ride on to Colorado Springs and hitch north along I-25.

I reached Denver late that afternoon and nearly froze when the temperature dropped through the floor at sundown. An American Indian family offered me a ride north and I squeezed in the backseat of an old station wagon with their two children. They deposited me at the the Fort Collins exit where I met Billy Lees at a small restaurant and had my first taste of Mexican food (recently explained in The Flipside chili cookoff column).

We spent a few great days driving in the mountains in a Volkswagen Beetle with bad breaks. We also ate poorly like two 19 year-olds would be expected to eat. Did I mention we had pizza for Thanksgiving dinner?

I left Fort Collins just as the snow began to fall. By the time I caught my ride home, the roads were covered but that didn’t stop us. The cramped Datsun crawled across eastern Colorado until we outran the storm. The sorority girl was asleep before Goodland, Kansas. Twenty hours later we pulled back into Murray, Kentucky. Now the story gets weird.

Back in Murray, a friend was entertaining her older brother who was visiting from Denver. He had met a twenty-something waitress at a roadhouse in Tennessee during his visit. I met them all the night I returned.

All the waitress did was complain about her ex-husband and how nice it was that he spent the week at his parent’s house in Colorado Springs.

Go figure.