A lot of families take annual vacations at a minimum. As I have grown up, I have come across countless people in my life who list “travel” as a passion and priority. New parents are excited to back their infants on a plane and camping trips because they “want to teach their kids to be good travelers.”
This idea is somewhat foreign to me. While moving around the country has forced me to expand my horizons and fly with an infant, it never felt natural or desired. I do want to travel more but we never seem to make the money or the time happen. And, even getting out the door to go to the park with my kids makes me consider embracing agoraphobia as a full time lifestyle.
Since it’s popular to blame your parents for all of your shortcomings, I’m going to point a big arrow at my childhood on this one. My first time on a plane was when I was 17, for my boyfriend’s (now husband’s) family vacation. I got to go along because apparently my husband was unpleasant to deal with on previous family vacations, and his family agreed that if I went along, he might not be such a crab ass. I think this went well, but his sisters made a lot of noise about exactly how happy he was that I was along, since they had to share a room with our teenage hormones. Josh and I in one bed, his sisters in the other. It’s all very exaggerated, on their part.
My family did not travel. We did not take vacations, much to my mother’s dismay. There are several reasons for this, either express or implied. I shall list the facts but also my assumptions here.
My dad is a farmer, and livestock doesn’t really stop eating because you wanted to go get drunk on a beach. There is no PTO. Actually, the opposite, you have to pay someone to do your work while you are gone. So arranging someone to do your chores is an extra expense and a giant pain in the ass.
Money was tight when I was a kid. My parents raised three kids on a single income during the farm crisis.
When we were older my siblings were in every sport, so every weekend was a basketball tournament, a baseball or softball tournament.
Assumption time: My parents are indoorsy. They do not hunt, fish or swim, and a lot of vacations I heard about included hiking, swimming, boating, or walking around at a wildly hot and expensive amusement park. All things my parents are not into. Plus, my dad gets motion sickness very easily, so I thought he was scared to fly.
Despite all of these reasons, we did take one family vacation. When I was about five years old, we went to Des Moines.
Now even if you are not a jetsetter, you might be aware that Des Moines is not a hot tourist destination unless you are in about a five hour driving radius, which we most certainly were. For a relatively short trip, this was quite the undertaking, even to my young eyes. My brother would have been about eight, my sister seven. While we all fit comfortably in my mom’s Gran Torino (no car seats) my parents did not yet have a minivan, so they rented a giant club van specifically for this trip.
Man, that thing was sweet, especially to a young child who doesn’t associate vans with creepy and evil things yet. We could sit in all different places and not be near each other and the back of the van folded down to a bed. There were so many cupholders and air vents, where my mom’s Gran Torino mostly sported ashtrays.
In addition to the van, we “rented” a babysitter. I was a little confused by this at the time, but now that I’m an adult, it makes total sense. My parents were taking us to crowded and public places and that was very foreign to all of us. So, they hired a sitter to have an extra set of hands and also so they could do some activities by themselves.
Despite the large size of the van, we managed to pack it to the gills. I remember the trip being very long (though it was probably only three hours) and being very worried about the rosary thing. The “rosary thing” was the fact that every trip longer than 10 miles meant we had to pray the rosary as a family, dictated by my father. And every trip I silently willed my dad to forget. He never did. But I was also worried because our babysitter went to the public school and I never saw him in church. The rosary was not just a thing you could suffer in silence. No no. You were called upon to make an “intention”, meaning something we were praying for. In the car, you would think, of course, we are praying for safe travel. But no, this was already implied, my dad was all about the extra credit church, extra credit prayers, and extra credit intentions.
Since my intention of “praying that we don’t have to pray the rosary” clearly didn’t work, I didn’t put a lot of passion into my intentions. I was the youngest and was always called upon first. I usually muttered something about harvest when it was clearly spring, and my dad would correct me and say, “you mean a good planting season?” and five year old me is like “Uh...yeah sure…” Being thankful for something or another was normally a crowd pleaser, but in that moment I wasn’t feeling super thankful about not being able to do my Lisa Frank activity book.
For my poor babysitter’s sake, I was worried his turn would come and he wouldn’t know what to do. But I don’t remember this being an issue. He was probably too busy thinking about how he ended up in a van with some Jesus freaks.
I’m not sure what the focus of this vacation was for my parents, but Adventureland was the goal for us. We had a great time at Adventureland, and this is where our babysitter showed his true worth. My brother wanted to go on some rowdy rides and my motion sick dad was not interested. So the babysitter took my brother on those rides. My dad did venture to the teacups with me, but came so close to throwing up on me he grabbed the center console and forbade me from spinning the little cup around. My mom rode with my sister, and they twirled by merrily as I awkwardly sat watching my dad breathe deeply.
Some other highlights from the Des Moines trip: Dad got lost on the way back to our condo, which resulted in us driving around rural Iowa in the middle of the night, low on gas, before smartphones. What should have been a 40 minute drive took three hours in the middle of the night, driving around rural Iowa. My sister and I were trying to sleep on that sweet fold down bed, but my brother was very nervous. My parents were playing the part of classic 80s parents. No concerns. My mom kept poking fun at my dad and he kept saying “I think there’s some dairy farmers here, if nothing else they wake up early and maybe we can get some gas from their farm tank.”
They were totally serious by the way, this was the solution. No map, just relying on the kindness of strangers. It was probably a more prudent time to whip out that rosary, but I wasn’t bringing it up, but by some miracle we didn’t have to ask for, we made it back to the condo at 1 am.
He also got lost on the golf course with my mom the next day. I guess at some point he could not take it any longer. Somehow, he got news from home that a lady from church died, so he felt compelled to go to the funeral. He got a call that he was asked to be a pallbearer at the funeral, so being the resourceful man my dad CAN be, he called a neighbor who was a dispatcher for a local trucking company and hitched a ride with a trucker to catch that funeral. I guess the thought of a lopsided coffin was unsettling but leaving his kids on family vacation? Totally fine.
Dad and my brother hitched a ride with a trucker who happened to be my cousin’s roommate. Small world.
And that….was the only family vacation we have taken...Until now.
Every year at some point my mom would bring up how we never have gone on a vacation and she’s always wanted to. They had traveled here and there but we never had as a family. So this year, for their 40th anniversary, we decided to make it happen. We asked my parents where they wanted to go, and Dad randomly said, “Montana.”
It was not what we were expecting. When you think Montana, you think beautiful mountains, crystal clear lakes, fishing, hunting, and bears. Not something I imagined for my parents but my dad said he wanted to see Yellowstone. My husband blurted out that his family had taken a trip there when he was young. Then he offered to drive my parents there, stopping to see Mount Rushmore, essentially reliving his childhood vacation.
This surprised me because I’ve heard of this vacation. The Yellowstone trip is one of the reasons his parents chanced teenage pregnancy to allow me to crash their future vacations. My husband's family, being more frequent on their family vacations, loaded down their own minivan and skipped the hired help. However, while my mother in law is in the driveway with her three kids, my father in law manufactures a “farm emergency” and says he can’t go on the trip.
My mother-in-law elects to go without him. But they stay married, which is a credit to her.
Then the long, lonely trek across South Dakota, which apparently did not impress the teenage Josh, who complained about just seeing “rocks and trees” until they hit Sturgis. In the days before the Internet, it was easy to overlook that the family vacation intersected with the Sturgis Biker Rally. To hear my mother in law tell it, my husband’s face was pressed up against the glass drooling over all of the bikes, and leather clad, pierced ladies. My husband says that’s an exaggeration, but I suspect some truth. His favorite shirt, to this day, is his 1997 Sturgis shirt. The sleeves are cut off, the black has faded to some green tinged gray, and there’s holes in it. So..something happened to my young, impressionable Josh, because it isn’t the beauty of this trashy looking shirt.
So, in the tradition of National Lampoon, we are re-creating this trip, with my two kids and my parents. There’s been a lot of prep done. Routes drawn, luggage racks installed, smart devices loaded. I know it will be rough at times, but I know it will be memorable and hopefully no one leaves early. A pause on all old lady deaths would probably make this a sure thing, and my sister in law is now the dispatcher at that same trucking company, and I’m telling her to screen her calls.
