Every year my husband and I plan a family vacation. Since we would rather not sell one of kids to pay for airfare, we usually drive to wherever we want to go.
As a child my family would go on vacations like this, everyone piling in the pickup camper and tooling down the road for a day or two, headed for Disney World for spring vacation. This is where I learned that driving through the night with small children is an AWESOME idea. Sleeping children are happy travelers, as my father used to say. My younger brothers and sister became bored quickly with the confines of the moving camper, familiar from previous years' vacations and travels. They passed out early on convenient little fold out beds, strategically placed throughout the camper, and I would revel in the quiet little world I was in. With my mother and father in the cab of the truck, I was left in back to keep an eye on the kids and get some sleep so that I could help navigate when one of my parents needed to take a break from the front. As a teenager I spent less time sleeping than I should have and instead occupied myself by reading a new book, working on word puzzles, or occasionally foraging in the small camper fridge to look for the snacks my parents hid from the little kids. Part of the fun and adventure of the vacation for me would be to see all of the cities, towns, tourist attractions, and billboards we passed on the way. I would marvel at the different fast food chains we didn't have (Waffle House, really?), or the fireworks stands that were illegal at home (stupid, boring Maine). These were snapshots of daily life for these people living so far from my home. I would spend hours lounging on the over-the-cab bed looking out the front window, feeling as though I was flying as I watched the lights and buildings zoom by in the dark.
Traveling with my children is a bit of a different experience. We do not have a camper, or a pickup for that matter. We have a standard, soccer-mom, 7 passenger minivan. My husband and I plan out the route we to take, and since I have family living in a few different far-away states, we would will plan a trip to their house and look for interesting places and things along the way. We do try to drive overnight, so that the kids sleep for a majority of the boring drive-time. Rather than the comfortable fold out bunks, as it nears evening we stop for the last (hopefully) bathroom break of the night, and as everyone piles back in I have them take off their shoes and my oldest son passes out the small individual blankets and pillows stored behind the rear seat. "Settling in" takes a while, complains ring out over the sound of the GPS directing back to the interstate. Once everyone has leg room, whatever electronic item they need to amuse themselves (with headphones please), and no one is accidentally touching anyone else in any way, I try to work the kinks out of my back and neck from spending an hour supervising the controlled chaos. Those are the times where I curse the laws against open containers of alcohol in a vehicle. I spend less time gazing out the window, instead I pour over the maps (good, ol' fashioned paper ones I won't leave home without) and directions I printed out - programming all of the correct turns into our GPS that seems to have a diabolical sense of humor when we are traveling away from home - getting my hubby all set to drive safely without distractions like decisions about exits or interstate changes, so that I can get some of that sleep that I used to scoff at.
Driving across country, I admit, has lost some of it's mystique for me. I know now that "South of the Border" is an insanely overpriced strip mall of crappy, not even locally made trinkets. The neon billboards counting down the miles to the oddly, and somewhat creepy bow-legged cowboy monument, are annoying because they block out the small towns and the signs gas stations close to the interstate. Waffle House can stay safely in the south where it belongs, since we narrowly missed disaster when my oldest son found a bulletin board tack in his pancakes, although they were nice enough to discount our meal 25% (insert sarcasm here). Although they probably don't want us back anyway after Colby managed to throw up all the way to the bathroom, even though I did leave a 25% tip that time. However, Sonic can build a franchise across the street of my house so that I have a lifetime supply of foot long chili dogs and cherry limeades. The roller skates might be tricky in the winter, but maybe they could do ice skates instead?
Traveling with my kids has had its ups and downs. It's cramped and everyone is sick of the van by the time we get there, but it's so amazing to close your eyes in one place and then open them and be in a totally new and different one. I hope that they are able to remember these trips as adventures rather than torture. Like when Branden was on the rope swing at the "crick" by Nana's house, or when Derek caught a snake in Grandma's yard and she screeched and yelled like she was on fire. I want them to have these new and interesting memories of all of us together as a family - laughing and playing, learning and discovering - instead of just the sometimes monotonous lives we lead on a daily basis.
This is very nicely done. You may have had to sweat blood to give it this easy, controlled, pleasant tone, but to the reader it feels completely relaxed, like dropping into a warm pool. And when your reader is a teacher, both anticipating and dreading problems, that really is a neat trick. (I dread problems, of course, because it's a hell of a lot harder to deal with them than it is to break out the champagne and confetti.)
ReplyDeleteI particularly admire graf 2, a graf which is not strictly required, but which sets the tone and sets up the van comparison. It's a generous graf a writer with less sense of her own writing might never have come up with, but it's a good one.
Anyway, 2 and 3 work together in fine fashion. Usually, after a double-barrel shot like that the reader is done, but your graf 4 really adds value and doubles down on and revisits stuff you first mention in graf 2.