Unpacking

From the time that I was in fifth grade until I started college, my family would pack into the station wagon each summer for our annual vacation week.  Over the years we took a lot of trips to Washington, D.C., spent a cloudy week in Montreal, tried Williamsburg, Virginia, and racked up some free nights in my grandmother's Florida condo.

I remember the monuments and museums, sure, but the comedy of the family travel drama tends to overshadow the travelogue.When my younger brother and I reminisce about these trips we talk about the time that my mother burst into tears upon first sight of our dingy Holiday Inn room and made us spend the rest of the night driving around searching fruitlessly for a new room, or the time she forced us on a sweaty march through site of the Battle of Bull Run and the ensuing interfamilial blowout rivaled the war between the states for hurt feelings and residual tension.

This talk always shocks my mother.  Though she did her fair share of fuming in traffic, weeping over accommodations and threatening to shut the whole trip down, her memories center around family togetherness and the sense of shared adventure. Until I became a mother I thought she was pretending not to remember the messier moments, but now I know that just as nature protects the species by dulling women's memories of the pain of childbirth, it protects the great tradition of the family vacation by filtering mothers' memories of the trips through a soft focus lens.

Though on our recent family vacation, I threatened more than once to call the whole thing off, by the time we hit the Delaware Memorial Bridge on our return trip, the frustrations, resentments and various sore spots I'd developed through the trip began to slip away. Though I'd tearfully apologized to my husband more than once during the trip for inflicting this expensive week and a half of punishment on us all, I turned to him as I drove across the bridge and sighed, satisfied, "Well, that was a nice trip."

I was telling the truth, because as I sped us up I-95, the hour that we spent driving around D.C. trying without a map to locate the zoo morphed from infuriating to humorous.  I remembered pointing out the Capitol to the girls each of the 15 times we looped past it, but not so much the tears of frustration that sprung forth somewhere after the tenth sighting. I smiled at the memory of my husband offering to run into a medical center in a questionable neighborhood for directions despite the fact that it housed only a detox center, an STD clinic and a psychiatric emergency room, and glazed over the part where I told him that if he dared to leave his wife and daughters in that parking lot I would be forced to lock him out of the car.

I thought back on the evening I spent getting reacquainted with a close high school friend I hadn't seen since college.  We sat with our husbands and watched our children play together in her very grown up home in Florida, far from our high school days in Central Massachusetts, and yet she was as fun and comfortable a presence as she'd been half a lifetime ago. On that drive back north I let slip away the hours leading up to our visit in which I'd been seized by high school-era anxiety about my clothes, my weight, my hair and the ridiculous spoiler on the back of our rental car.  And I tried to let go the haunting feeling I'd had woken with the morning after the visit that if high school me had been sitting next to me on that couch she'd have been less than impressed and not at all understanding about the rental car.

I remembered our visit to the Nickelodeon Hotel, the grand finale of the vacation, for the thrill the girls got from sleeping in their Spongebob-themed room and not for their teary souvenir demands.  The woman who crowded onto a small bench with us in the lobby during check-in and immediately began muttering angrily to herself and scratching as if infested became another travel anecdote punchline and not cause to search the suite so aggressively for bedbugs that Little E refused to sleep under her covers and would only allow us to drape her with a towel.

It is likely that someday my daughters will sit all grown up at my table finishing off Thanksgiving desserts and laughing about the time I used being desperately lost in D.C. to point out to their father why we really should have smart phones.  They may mock my shouting about how lucky they should consider themselves to have the kind of parents who would take them on vacation and shake their heads at the ridiculousness of dragging two young girls around a sweltering southern college campus so we could show them where we ate, where we went to class, where we lived, where we studied, where we bought books, where we went to parties, where we got our mail, and on and on.

If this happens I will probably remind them of bobbing in warm gulf waters, spotting dolphins, riding waterslides, seeing elephants feed and sitting in the gazebo on the campus pond watching the ducks land, but I hope that I'll also appreciate the humor in their memories. And I hope that they'll someday plan their own family vacations, so as to to prove to me that they weren't too traumatized by ours.

Why I travel with my kids

Why do I travel with my kids?  I have been asking myself this question a lot over the past five days. On the surface, the answers are obvious: experiencing the world through their unjaded eyes, encouraging them to seek out new experiences, enjoying the camaraderie of a shared adventure.  Yet, as we wind through our summer tour of the hot and humid states, I'm finding these reasons lacking the inspiration that I need to make it through some of the more challenging moments.

For those times when I find myself dragging a screaming child off the beach, negotiating blanket placement between two kids unaccustomed to bed-sharing, or pulling off the highway for a bathroom break 15 minutes after the previous bathroom break, I have come up with these less obvious, possibly more compelling benefits to travelling with my children.

I am forced to face my fears.

Though I nearly wept a of couple weeks ago when I had to bring Little E to the foul composting toilet at our beach at home, life on the road demands that I put aside my long held belief that every surface in a public bathroom is coated in a microscopic layer of the fecal matter of dirty strangers.  I cannot help but quietly chant my public bathroom mantra: Don't touch anything; don't touch anything.  But when Little E asked at a Delaware rest area whether she could touch the floor with the bottoms of her shoes, I told her okay --and I didn't even attempt to sterilize her Crocs when we got to the hotel.


I learn new things about my children --and myself.

Some of the little foibles that my children have displayed this week are harmless. Little E has decided that she is a dog and bought herself a dog bandanna in the bookstore of my alma mater (and wore said bandanna to dinner). Big E likes to practice figure skating moves as we walk down city sidewalks. These little quirks may not be particularly fashion forward or convenient for fellow pedestrians, but I actually find them kind of endearing.  That the lack of Radio Disney in the rental car brings my daughters to tears and that my choosing to leave on a station with "grown up music" is received as a personal insult, is much more concerning and shall be addressed. That I will endure an entire Bonnie Raitt song despite my own distaste for it simply because I enjoy watching both girls scream angrily and cover their ears? That probably needs some exploration as well.

I gain new (more accurate?) perspectives on myself.

The other day as I attempted to cull some of the 200 shots already on my camera, I came across one of myself sitting by the edge of the children's pool at the beach down the street from my in-laws.  My shoulders were slightly slumped and the bathing suit that had looked so strategic in the mirror at home was not living up to its promise. I just barely stopped myself from wailing to my husband, "I look like someone's mother!" Ludicrous, I know, that this is so upsetting, as I have been someone's mother for over seven years now. As the trip went on, my earth shattering revelation that I do in fact look like someone's mother was further cemented by the fact that I carried a purse stuffed with two handfuls of broken and melting restaurant crayons and a barrel of Wet Ones.  Then, the other day in Richmond Little E recoiled in horror as I dressed for the day. "Not that dress!  Don't put on that dress with the flowers!," she cried mortified. 

I ignored her pleas spent the morning in sensible shoes and a flowered dress with a camera case hanging from my shoulder and a mega pack of wipes in my bag, looking every bit like someone's mother at the campus where I long ago wore tight jeans and cute heels carried no more than a lipstick in my pocket .

I'm hoping that these new insights will see me through the rest of the trip, but there are still six days, one flight, 500 miles in the car and countless public toilets to come.  Wish me luck.

The Road Trip, Revised

Right now I'm feeling thankful for the surge in the bed bug population, high gas prices and Little E's recent claims of car sickness.

These are the things that convinced me that the road trip I'd planned for this summer was a really bad plan.  When we take off on our summer tour of the hot and humid states, the driving part --the part where I planned to learn to love the journey as much as the destination-- will be truncated by half.

We'll still stop at my husband's parents' beach house at the Jersey Shore, not the fist-pumping part but the part that is apparently referred to as the Irish Riviera.  There we'll negotiate bizarre traffic patterns banning left turns and will feel like underachievers when every other couple we see has at least four children in tow.

We'll still stop in Richmond, where we'll drag the kids around the campus where we met, because, of course, kids love brick buildings and their parents' reminiscences.

And then, and this is the best part, we will get on an airplane and make the rest of the trip to Florida in two hours --a trip that I originally thought would take two days.

I will enjoy sipping from the warm Diet Coke balanced on my knee in my cramped quarters on the plane and I will enjoy watching reality show repeats on the seatback screen. Mostly, I will enjoy hurtling through the air 30,000 feet above the motels along I-95 where I'd have peeled back the sheets and studied the mattress for signs of infestation, above the countless stinking, dingy public toilets I'd have had to endure with the girls, and above the hundred squealing arguments that would have spilled forth from the backseat.

I will, in my way, enjoy the journey as much as the destination.

Dream: Road Trip! (?)

People complain about air travel. Sure there are the airlines' endless fees and loose regard for scheduled arrival times, but I can live with that.  There's something magical about folding yourself into your couple of hundred square inches of space on one side of the country and emerging mere hours later --though a little sweatier and more disheveled-- on the other side.

I wish I were one of those people who could value the journey just as much as the destination, but I'm much happier to spend a few hours balancing a little cup of warm Diet Coke on my knee and trying to ignore a full bladder while watching repeats of Real Housewives on the seat back screen if it gets me to where I want to be in a hurry.

Car travel holds no magic for me.  I am not a road trip girl.

My first extra-long road trip came the summer before my senior year in high school, when my parents combined a college tour of the eastern seaboard with a family driving vacation to Florida.  On that trip I discovered the miracle of Dramamine for passing long hours in a blur, and was dragged on more than one campus tour drool-slicked and bleary-eyed. 

Almost ten years later, my husband and I decided that driving to Miami would be a good idea, despite the fact that we were in the middle of buying our first home and had no cell phones with which to stay in touch with the mortgage broker, lawyer and realtor, who all seemed to require constant contact. It is a wonder that we didn't both end up with trench mouth given the questionable sanitation of the side of the road pay phones we used to make our calls.  After explaining to the exasperated realtor that she'd have to repeat some complicated title issue to me one more time because a semi-truck was passing by the first time, I told my husband that we would never take another driving trip again.

But, of course, we did.  When Little E was about seven months old and Big E three and a half, we drove as far as Richmond, Virginia, where my husband and I went to college.  On the return trip, trapped in gridlock traffic outside of DC with Little E inconsolable about an unfortunate diaper incident and Big E herself making weepy, desperate demands for a bathroom, I bellowed, "We will never take another driving trip again!"

So, naturally, I find myself  planning another major driving trip for this summer.  I need a big change of scene at least once or twice a year, but my part-time salary calls for austerity measures so we won't be buying plane tickets like we have the past few summers.  Instead, we'll be driving to Florida with some stops on the way and staying gratis in my grandmother's Florida condo.

I am trying to banish images of the endless gray pavement of I-95 and fly-infested roadside toilets.  I'm trying to pretend that portable DVD players will fully entertain the girls for the endless hours of driving, that there will be no tears or shouting --from them or from me.  I'm trying to conjure, instead, visions of walking the girls along the lakeside path that my husband and I strolled together as college freshman and of the girls sifting through the sand on the Gulf Coast beach where my brother and I searched for shark teeth on our family vacation.

I'm also trying to become someone who can appreciate the journey as much as the destination. But I'll probably pack some Dramamine just in case.

Play: Travels with Cleo

A lot of people consider their dog to be sort of a practice child.  While my husband and I wouldn't have admitted it to ourselves back in 2002 when we first got our little Boston Terrier, Cleo, it's surely no coincidence that a year later I was seven months pregnant with Big E.

If you met Cleo, you'd be really glad that we had the opportunity to practice on an animal before we started in on human babies.

Cleo stoically tolerates the girls' pokes and pulls. She is so reliably housetrained that I think she'd sooner rupture her bladder than embarrass us all with a puddle on the floor. She welcomes us home with an enthusiastic flurry of licks whether we've been gone for 10 hours or 10 minutes.  She love us immensely; it's the rest of the world that she can't tolerate.

Our vet has flagged Cleo's file with a bright orange "caution" sign.  When he found out that we had children, he was horrified to the point that I wondered if he wouldn't make a call to Child Protective Services.

During a visit to another vet's office to check bandages on a mysterious (and expensive) wound she got during a rare escape from our fenced yard, she leaped at least three feet in the air in an attempt to clamp onto the crotch of a friendly technician who'd had the audacity to wave hello to her.  His fertility was saved only by the plastic cone she'd been forced to wear around her neck.

Once on a ferry boat ride to an island rental cottage, after she rebuffed a fellow passenger's attempts to befriend her, he sympathetically asked if we'd rescued her from an abusive home, and more than once people have politely inquired about whether we'd ever consider sending her to one of those no-kill shelters.

Because of Cleo's anti-social tendencies, my parents are pretty much the only people who can (or will) dogsit for us.  So when we all attended a family engagement party in New Jersey the weekend before last, we were forced to take Cleo on the road.  As an added bonus, my husband, the girls and I were staying with my in-laws who are definitely not dog people.  My mother-in-law is, in fact, terrified of dogs and has been scared of Cleo since she first met her when she was just a fluffy guinea pig-sized puppy I could hold in the palm of my hand, long before we knew she was vicious.

So I fretted about this trip for weeks, imagining various scenarios that involved my in-laws huddled in terror on top of the dining room table or animal control officers storming the house with tranquilizer guns.  I was convinced that failure was the only option.

Cleo, apparently, had other ideas.  Save the occasional dirty look or low octave growl at my father-in-law, she was a model travelling companion.  She wagged her tail at my mother-in-law but knew enough not to approach her, she exhibited far better manners than Little E on the trip, and unlike the children she was happy to sleep for the entire six-hour drive home.

It was a relief and it was a lesson: I must stop catastrophizing and expecting the worst of every situation.  Thanks to the practice child for reminding me so that I might learn to spare the actual children.

Let's hope my mother-in-law never stumbles across this photo of our dog contaminating her pristine white spread.

Play: What happens in Weirs Beach

Nine years ago my husband and I spent our February vacation week in Las Vegas.  We dressed up, gambled unsuccessfully, ate in restaurants with no children's menu, drove a convertible to the Hoover Dam, and saw Tom Jones live in concert.

Yesterday we commemorated our long ago trip with a day at the Guinness-confirmed World's Largest Arcade in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire --sort of like a kiddy Vegas.  Actually, as it is in a part of New Hampshire that sorely lacks the glamour of Vegas, it's more a kiddy Reno. Maybe a kiddy Laughlin? 

The arcade was a two-hour drive north, only a day trip but completely outside of our realm.  As snowy mountains came into view and the road dipped down next to a frozen lake dotted with ice shanties, my husband remarked, "This is a real adventure." 

And in that instant he reframed the day for me.  What I had seen as a way to pass a winter Sunday, a trip to a glorified Chuck E. Cheese, was lit with the spark of the unknown.  I love adventures, the novelty, the possibility, the discovery, and suddenly this was one.

The arcade, like Vegas, was a lot of bad carpet, dimly-lit rooms and people with cups full of change shuffling around glassy-eyed.  The girls and I left my husband in a dark upstairs room filled with towering rows of classic arcade games and blaring Boy George.  In this room, which intimidated me just as much as those roped-off areas in Vegas where high rollers play inscrutable games like Baccarat, my husband passed some time with Ms. Pac Man and recorded the high score on Galaxian.

Instead of spending the night blowing our cash at video blackjack in hopes of scoring a few free Heinekens, the girls and I spent the afternoon dropping $20 winning the tickets that we traded in for two ring pops at the end of the day.  Rather than spinning around on a thrillride 1000 feet above the Strip, my husband and I watched the girls take turns on mini ferris wheel that lifted them at least 5 feet.

On the way home, we did not have kobe beef carpaccio for dinner.  Instead my husband made a quick turn in to a strip mall "diner" with a rusted pink Cadillac for an awning, and before I could question the cleanliness or the menu he reminded me meaningfully, "This is an adventure."  The sides featured cottage cheese, mashed turnips and pickled beets and every plate came adorned with a frill of kale and an orange slice, and save for the newborn that the elderly hostess was cradling we were the youngest people there by 30 years.  We had breakfast for dinner and it was delicious.

Before we had kids our exploits used to go well beyond Vegas: snorkeling in foreign waters, flying off to Europe, bargaining with street vendors, navigating public transportation without the benefit of understanding even the alphabet in which our directions were written, riding a tuk-tuk through crowded Bangkok streets, riding an elephant through a Balinese forest.  I loved these trips, loved the thrill of stepping off the plane and breathing in the air of a place that I'd never been before and where I knew not a soul.

There are days when I really, really miss the grand scale of our old adventures.  But yesterday was not one of those days.