Gill-Frank Road Trips

[Compiled from various posts on the Gilliomville message board, contributed by various Gillioms and Franks]:

Remember Nick asking us, “Do you wanna eat at King's Island (spoken in a joyful tone of voice) or Pearl's Diner (spoken in a tone of disgust)”?

Pearl's Diner is a great memory. Now that I am a man and no longer a child, I would much rather eat at a diner that at an amusement park. I think my true motivation was to try to get to the park as early as possible so I could be one of the first people on the Beast or whatever the big roller coaster was back then.

I can just imagine the parents tallying up the breakfast bill. Do we wanna fill up at a reasonable diner with free coffee refills, or load up on snack foods at five times the regular price?

We met a girl at a party who was from Richmond, IN. She was familiar with all the rides at King's Island and Cedar Point, and she seemed to prefer King's Island. She called me "old school" when I mentioned the Screamin' Demon. Man, it was fun to go there.

Do you remember the trip to Michigan?  I remember staying in some cheap cabins and Jonnie climbed up the lattice work on the front of the office. I do not have one other memory of the whole trip.

I remember car problems at a grumpy guy's campground we called Crazy Gukenheimer and the sun shining as we boarded a big boat.

Crazy Gukenheimer was the man who rented us our cabins. Herb remembers when we stopped to see if there was a vacancy, there was an old woman in the office. She wrote a note and put it in the mouth of a large dog. She told the dog to go find Daddy and he took off to find the man that Jon and Herb later called Crazy Gukenheimer. Pretty soon the guy came. He had been fishing down at the lake behind the cabins. By that time, Jonnie had climbed up the lattice work of the office. We spent the night there and I remember you four boys were going all directions.

I remember the boat ride too, but I didn't understand where we were going or why we were on it. I thought it was magnificent. I also remember being terrified of the haunted house, and waiting with some of the adult women while Jonnie and either Nick or Ross went inside with my Dad, I think. I was terrified that Jonnie wouldn't survive to come back out again. There were pictures on the outside of devilish horrors I didn't understand -- and that made them REALLY scary, because Jonnie and I imagined the worst possibilities of what was going on in there.

I remember being terrified in that haunted house!  Dad was carrying me by the end of it.  One monster jumped out and scared the crap out of me – I started crying and the monster goes, “I was just kidding, little kid”.

The island we visited was Mackinaw. We took a ferry over and rented horse drawn carriages to see the island. There are no cars on the island. Most of us have been there several times. It is a nice short trip from Indiana.

Do you boys remember getting pigs in a blanket at IHOP and putting every kind of syrup at the table?