Great Atlantic & Pacific Tour Company

I have traveled up and down the East Coast and across country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Pacific to the Atlantic, with my mother and my daughter. They have been great company to travel with. Here’s a picture I took of them on Marco Island, Fla., in 1993.

I have driven across country alone and I have traveled with family and family dogs. My first trip across country was with my mother, brother and grandfather when we flew to Tucson, Ariz., in 1958 to visit cousins, my grandfather’s branch of the family with the gypsy gene who had migrated out there from Philadelphia 20 or 30 years earlier. A fan of Westerns, I was thrilled to be in Cowboy Country. In those days to get from Phoenix to Scottsdale, you had to drive across miles of open desert. In 1967 my husband, four-and-a-half-month-old daughter, Kellie, and I drove from the East Coast to Southern California to live, courtesy of the United States Navy. In 1985, Kellie, her boyfriend and I drove from Los Angeles to Wilmington, Del. Here I am in Charleston, S.C. I have a funny thing about Charleston: I am compelled to look at all the graveyards, studying the names on the tombstones to see if I recognize myself from a former lifetime.

On that same trip, here are Kellie and I in Goodyear, Ariz., near Phoenix.

In 1999 I was living in Naples, Fla. Here are two photos, below, from when Kellie came to visit me and I took her to Chokoloskee Island, just south of Everglades City. After she got back home to California, trying to remember where I took her, she asked me, “What was the name of the chocolate place?”

Here are my mother and her toy poodle BeeGee (Beau Geste), in 1995. The three of us are waiting for the Cape May-Lewes Ferry.

Here are my mother and BeeGee at the south end of the Avalon, N.J., boardwalk, sitting on the steps of a restaurant, 1995.

Again, my favorite tour companions after tea at the Ritz, Naples, Fla., 1997.

–Samantha Mozart