Death of the Family Vacation?

So a few weeks ago, while we were on vacation in Utah, Elizabeth and I heard a blurb about an upcoming story on NPR about the passing of the "Golden Age of the family vacation," as if family vacations are now dead or at least past their prime. We were going to meet a friend at a park in Salt Lake City, so we didn't get to hear the story, but here is what I think they were going to say: Disneyland, airplanes, in-car DVD players, and high gas prices have killed the great American family roadtrip. Maybe they said nothing of the sort, but I'm going to proceed on the assumption that this was the premise of their story.

Of course, I'm not sure I know what a great American family vacation looks like. Here is my image: the family, packed into a car with stuff strapped to the roof, driving to some National Park, or along a historic route, or to see family members who live far away; along the way, the parents lead the children in all manner of time-consuming games to keep the kids from fighting and whining: playing I spy; singing show tunes and children's songs; passing out books and puzzles and yarn; etc. Most of these activities work only for a short while and then the kids are fighting and Dad is yelling and threatening to turn the car around and go home--a stupid threat, even he knows this, but it is tradition and an easy thing to say when he is angry. Through the road trip, the kids get to know their country more fully, bond with their family, and receive mental bookmarks to place in their memories as they become self-actualized.

I am certainly glad for some of the trips we went on when I was a kid. Mind you, we were poor and my experiences reflect this. Some of the experiences I remember were not necessarily pleasant, but I'm still glad for them. Here are a few that stand out in my mind right now:

I don't remember where we were going or how old I was (young), but I remember mountains of snow on either side of the car. We stopped and got out. The road was at the bottom of a seven-foot deep white canyon. The day was fairly warm and the snow was densely packed and taller than both my parents. My dad lifted each of us kids individually up onto the towering snow. Somehow this unexpected snowy encounter became a main attraction in the trip, something we talked about as much as whatever it was we were originally going to see.

On another trip, the family was driving during the summer to some desert location. We traveled in my dad's beat up 1965 baby blue Ford truck. My parents and the baby sat up in the front bench seat. The rest of us rode in the bed of the truck, protected from the wind by a camper shell. On this trip, my parents had left us a case of Shasta soda to quench our thirst, but we worked our way quickly through it and we were beginning to get thirsty again. I also needed to pee. We banged on the window to let my parents know they needed to stop, but they had had enough stopping on behalf of whiny kids (with seven kids, it must have seemed as though every twenty minutes one or the other of the children needed to stop). When I got no response from my parents, my older brother, Clinton, suggested I just pee in one of the empty soda cans, which I did with great relief. When I was finished, I decided to dump my urine out the window. But Dumoan, my oldest brother, grabbed the can from me. He was thirsty and didn't want me wasting the remainder of a soda; apparently he hadn't seen me quietly relieving myself in the corner. I started to tell him that that warm fluid in there was not soda pop, but Clinton shook his head as if to say: "Let's just see what happens." Dumoan took a deep draft of the warm, salty hint-of-ammonia Shasta and then spit it out in horror. Clinton was laughing heartily while I chuckled in disbelief. Dumoan punished us both that day; he failed to see the humor that kept us laughing even while being pounded with fists.

In that same blue truck, we took a trip to a couple of the National Parks in southern Utah. Zion NP stands out in my mind, mostly because it seemed somehow otherworldly, exotic, pre-historic. I remember water falls and trees and weird rock formations. I also remember a shirtless man whose entire torso and arms were covered in tattoos. He was a hairy, tan, big-bellied man and I hiked close behind him, trying to untangle all those images from each other. I had seen tattoos before, but never in this quantity; they were like cave paintings: stories that couldn't begin to tell themselves to me but held some meaning anyway, overlapping stories, some grotesque, some beautiful, some scary, others comforting. All kinds of human emotions wrapped up in ink impregnated in a fat man's skin.

When I was eleven or so, we took a trip to Vegas and stayed in a hotel, an unusual treat for us. My parents, being frugal, chose the cheapest hotel they could find. The whole family slept in a single room with one queen-sized bed. Most of us were strewn out on the dirty carpet, using a pair of pants or a couple of shirts for pillows. Our poor sleep that night, however, was not due to physical discomfort, but rather to the rhythmic knocking of our fellow patrons next door. My parents are fairly sure our neighbor was a prostitute with a customer. They were annoyed and embarrassed to have all their kids hear that display. I can't say for sure what the profession was of the person next door, but I do know I was intrigued by the whole thing.

In southeastern New Mexico, I saw my first cockroach; it was crawling up the shower wall in another inexpensive hotel the whole family slept in. We were on our way from Colorado to Texas. Somehow seeing the cockroach was validating. I had seen thousands of commercials for cockroach killing chemicals and contraptions, but never seen the actual creature that caused Americans to spend millions of dollars to control them. On that trip, I knew we had gone somewhere.

For spring break when I was fourteen, we went to St. George, Utah to visit my maternal grandma. We didn't know that St. George was a spring break Mecca for college and high school students. We went to "the narrows" above the town to shimmy our way up a long crack in the sandstone. It was fun, but what I enjoyed most were the hundreds of physically mature girls sunning themselves in swimsuits on the rocks. I had never seen anything like it.

When I was eighteen, I took a trip with my dad. Since it was just the two of us, I don't know if it qualifies as a family vacation, but it had the feeling of one. This time, however, I did most of the driving while he sat in the passenger's seat. We didn't sing songs or play games. We talked, like we had never talked before. We talked about relationships and love and sex and religion and sorrow and life. When we spoke, I noticed he did not hold back in the discussion; his words and ideas were not sanitized and carefully chosen. They were honest. Our relationship was not like the father and son relationship I had become used to; we were now peers. I was now an adult, and that was the first time I had felt like one.


On this most recent family trip Elizabeth, Sonora, Rowyn and I took, we visited friends in Boise, spent time with Elizabeth's family in Utah, I went backpacking with Clinton, we went camping, to the Lagoon amusement park and to family reunions in Blanding and Logan, Utah. It felt like a family vacation: I snapped at Sonora a couple of times; we stopped occasionally to feed Rowyn or change her diaper. Sonora helped entertain Rowyn, sang songs with us, started learning to play "I spy," and spent lots of time playing with her cousins. She also participated in paper boat races, rode a horse, rode a roller coaster, picked peas and raspberries, learned to fly a kite, went to the dinosaur museum, and saw all of her grandparents. I wonder what, in 30 years, she will remember from this trip.



I certainly hope the family vacation is not dead; if it were, I think we as a nation would be poorer for it. Family vacations provide rare moments in time by which we can gauge the progression of our lives, our development as individuals and as part of a family unit.