Traveling to a new job, our second honeymoon

While I didn’t have a single interview until much later in Phoenix, covered in another topic, the attempt put my resume’ on the market and corporations in Houston were hiring. (The interview and associated stories are not part of my memories of Marilyn so if covered at all will have to be in a different forum.) Since Houston was on the way to Phoenix we decided to take the job. So the middle of February saw us on the road, again traveling to our married life in a new city.

I would like to be able to say that we gave each other longing gazes, and sweet-talked the entire trip but what actually occurred is that we drove two cars. There being two of us, and two cars, meant that we couldn’t even see each other when we were “on the road” but we made up for it most of the time when we stopped.

And stop we did. We made side trips to several places. I’ve selected a few of the more memorable for greater detail below. Since I wasn’t then and haven’t kept a journal what I’m leaving out may not be all that much but you wouldn’t know that if I didn’t tell you.

In Tennessee we discovered that Jack Daniels was distilled in a dry county. But they did let us smell the well alcohol laden vent gasses in our tour.

We stayed overnight in Nashville with a visit to the Grand Ol Opry.

Our next overnight stay was in the bad side, well the less affluent side of Birmingham. We would remark on this as our first of a trend later when we knew it for a trend. Many of the places we visited inevitably involved some tour of the more scenic side of the town, a nice looking road would be a dead end into the area dump or sewage treatment plant. Although to the best of my recall we never again tried to sleep in the scenic area.

Then came New Orleans. We stayed there several nights. While a lot of what we did involved truly good food, including the beans and rice at Hobo Billy’s and Bananas Foster at Brennan’s, we also visited Preservation Hall (I didn’t understand why anyone would want to preserve the hall but preserving the jazz was great.), walked on the waterfront, looked in on all the bars, watched people, took a ride on the Charles Street trolley, had our faces immortalized with a characterization (My upwardly growing eyebrows were made into devilish horns that was obvious as to the devilment in mind while Marilyn was characterized as an angel.), and my first introduction into shopping.

Up until that time, I had always thought that the purpose of shopping was to find something you wanted to buy. Marilyn nicely limited her introduction of shopping as an end in itself so I didn’t drop but I got the message. It was much later, and may make a separate topic in and of itself, that I heard the dreaded combination: “Since we are here, do you mind if I go in [to this store]?” and “Why don’t you come in and keep me company?”

Finally we made it to Houston and for two weeks were put up in a hotel at the Greenway Plaza. The fun we had living within walking distance of my work…

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Marilyn lost her life to cancer but was able to truly "live" until the very end due to a lymphedema garment from Don Kellogg, inventor and founder of Telesto-Medtech. It is due to the "living" he provided Marilyn and through his suggestion and connection with Saskia Thiadens of the National Lymphedema Network that the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund exists. It needs other people's help to remain a living memorial of Marilyn. Please help other people receive the gift of living by donating to the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund. Thank you.