Summer Vacation Clothes

All of my vintage women's magazines show summer vacation clothes like this one from the 1950s.

Men and women dressed up to travel and to sightsee unless they were at the beach.

Hats, gloves, high heels, on the women anyway.

Down to nylon covered legs. Bet you anything there was a girdle under that dress too.

Not too much had changed by the early 1960s either. When RH and I could afford a few days away before we had children we headed for the Blue Ridge in my red MG.

I didn't travel in hose and high heels but there were certain things you wore in a small sports car then and a kerchief was a necessity.

RH's idea of chic was matching windbreakers for us.

My sentimental husband has held onto them all these years.

When we spent the night at the lodge at the Peaks of Otter on the Blue Ridge in Virginia, I naturally wore a dress to supper, nylons and heels included. 

When we left the cool Blue Ridge and traveled on to hotter than hades Williamsburg, I didn't wear high heels or nylons but I did wear a dress because a lady just didn't check into a hotel wearing pants. 

And the next day when we crammed touring all of Williamsburg into one long blistering hot day I wore a yellow linen sheath, a panty girdle, nylons and heels, a dressy purse on my arm.

I don't think we took any snapshots but when I googled 1963 yellow sheath I found this one that was nearly the same, mine having a scooped neck instead.

I wanted to see everything and as we walked around the whole town there was not a single woman that I remember not wearing a dress and nylons and high heels, church purse on their arm. 

We ate in Chowning's Tavern that night dressed the same and I remember the tavern as very warm so think it must not have been air conditioned at the time.

RH wasn't in a suit and tie that day but it wouldn't have occurred to him to wear blue jeans while touring Williamsburg so it was slacks and a sports shirt.

How times have changed but thank God that women today don't have to wear nylons or the panty hose that came after them. 

Or panty girdles. 

But I'm glad to see that women are now wearing pretty summer dresses again. Because that's one thing the 1950s had, really pretty dresses.

And personally, I miss seeing a man wearing a seersucker suit on a hot July day.

Going on Vacation?

If you aspire to utter freedom and have a vague premonition that all is not well with an upper molar, go first to your dentist. Do not think that you can escape from a dubious tooth. Though you take the wings of the airline express it will be there.

Abbie Graham in 1939 book,

Time Off and On

with her advice about vacations.

So well do I remember when Abbie's advice would have saved our long weekend vacation to the Iron Mountains, the purpose of which was to take state roads, not interstates, from Nashville to Laurel Bloomery in East Tennessee where we would visit the Iron Mountain Pottery.

Halfway there our five-year-old began suffering from tooth pain. We stopped at a drugstore and bought anything we thought might numb his gums and hurried on to the pottery, quickly picked out six glossy green bowls and headed for home, interstates all the way.

The next day our dentist pulled the abscessed tooth and put in a spacer to hold a place for the adult tooth that had not yet begun to show up.

I love these green bowls. They never go in the dishwasher.

But every time I use them I think of our little boy sitting in the backseat moaning with pain, a high price for some bowls.

Going on vacation? Have the least twinge of tooth pain?

Better see your dentist first!