New game - this is your year!

Here’s a chain game that ought to be fun. One of us says a year that can be expected to be within the lifetime of at least some fellow dopers. The next respondent to the thread should say what memories the mention of that year brings to his or her mind. Not historical information…personal memories. In other words, if someone enters 1969, the next poster should not mention the moon landing or Woodstock unless he or she is describing having watched it or participated in it or has some personal connection to it.

After sharing, enter another year.

I’ll kick it off with 1996. Cross-country trip in January. Got out of New York just before the big blizzard hit, but it caught up to us in Ohio. Saw the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Carlsbad Caverns, Los Angeles (best ribs I ever tasted there), Las Vegas, Space Centers Houston and Huntsville, the Cabbage Patch Babyland Hospital in Cleveland, Georgia. Saw Churchill Downs under a foot of snow, saw Elvis’s grave on his birthday. Car broke down in Arizona, forcing us to spend a week in Tacna, that great metropolis 40 miles out of Yuma. We had to hop a commuter fight to Phoenix to spend Shabbos amongst other Jews. In April, my wife and I watched the Royals play the Yankees in the snow. The highlight of the year came in May, the birth of our first child (a boy). In July, I entered the full-time workforce.

Over to you guys…1980.

Darn! This was meant to be in MPSIS. Mods, a favor please…?

1980

I was 15 years old and spent the summer with a school group touring Italy and Spain, with a brief pop over to Morocco for the weekend.

When I look back at the travel diary I kept, it says nothing of the amazing things we saw, only a detailed analysis of the meals we ate (lunch was this, dinner was that, and oh yeah…we went to some museum called the Prado and saw a bunch of pictures). Of course, there was no drinking age, and us being a bunch of teenagers…woo boy…what a mess!

Still it was a memorable time and I still look at the pictures and think about how different it would be to visit the same places now.

Alright…1985.