Every summer our family took a long vacation across country. The destinations we visited, and the routes we took, varied from year to year. However, one thing never changed: we always went by car. I suppose that a family of six really had no choice, considering the prohibitive cost of air travel. But we kids held out hope, year after year, that this summer would be the one where we’d finally get to see the inside of one of those shiny metal flying machines. (Planes held the same mystical fascination for us that space ships must hold for other children.) Alas, that rosy day never came and, well into our teens, we spent our summers strapped into a beat-up station wagon topped with a car top carrier.
On the bright side, traveling provided many special opportunities for our parents to teach us lessons that were not necessarily apparent in daily life. Some examples:
Leave the house spotless
Before leaving for any trip, my parents would clean our house until it squeaked. Every bed had to be made, every dish washed and put away, every trash can empty, and every item of clothing laundered. For some reason, we also had to close the doors to all the rooms. My mother firmly believed that the worst possible thing in the world was returning home from vacation to a messy house. So we always left it in a sterilized state. As an adult, I still find myself rushing around the kitchen, placing freshly washed pots in cupboards, as my husband impatiently honks at me from the driver’s seat of our fully packed car.
Depart on car trips at 4:00 am
Many is the morning that we kids remember being awakened while it was still dark outside, quickly bundled into clothes, and limply escorted into the station wagon. My parents always liked to hit the road before the morning paper arrived. The theory was twofold. First, you could get one last night of sleep at home, without having to drive through the night or pay for a hotel room. Secondly, you got an early start, avoided all the morning traffic, and could get a couple hundred miles from home before the kids fully gained consciousness.
Television shows are a measure of time
As anyone who has traveled a long distance by car knows, time begins to have no meaning after a certain number of miles are logged. This is especially true for small children, since their grasp of time is tenuous to begin with. To combat this, my parents developed a foolproof way of telling us how much time stood between our next stop and us. When one of us would offer up the inevitable plaint from the backseat, “How much longerrrrrrrr?” my parents would reply using units we could understand. “Two Sesame Streets and one Mister Rogers,” they would respond. This, as any fan of educational television knows, is equivalent to two-and-a-half hours. Using this child-friendly estimator, even a three-year old could figure out whether lunch was only 15 minutes away, or whether we weren’t going to even slow down for another half day.
Never stop unless you absolutely must stop
Perhaps because we took such long and involved trips, or perhaps just because my parents were masochists, a typical day’s drive for us usually involved about 1,000 miles. With so much ground to cover, stops of any kind became a prized and rare commodity. Generally, my parents liked to use one stop and one stop only to take care of: lunch, a fresh tank of gas, six bathroom breaks, souvenir buying, stretching of legs, repacking the car top carrier, separating any bickering children, changing diapers, any necessary medical attention, relevant phone calls, sightseeing, mechanical repairs, and hugs. Sometimes they’d work a second, similar stop into the evening, then continue to drive straight through the night. This was not a car for whiners.
If you do make a “frivolous” stop, make it count
One thing that my parents were always willing to go out of the way to see, on these jaunts, was a place of natural or historical significance. Yes, I grew up in a family of National Park junkies. Before every trip, my father would spend weeks with his maps and his pads of yellow, lined paper, plotting the route that would take us by the greatest number of national treasures. As children, we hiked the Grand Canyon, toured Native American ruins, discussed whether Mount Rushmore was a “gyp,” timed the geysers at Yellowstone, and ran among the great Sequoias. Whenever possible, we camped overnight at the parks, enjoying the thrills of bear warnings, ranger campfire talks, and carry-along casserole heated over our miniature propane grill. The love of these parks has never left any of us. If anything, we kids are even bigger park addicts now than we were as children.
When checking into a hotel, never admit the true occupancy
Most of the time, on the vacations we took early in my life, my family camped at night. But as we got older, more often we would stay overnight at a Holiday Inn or some comparable motor lodge. My parents would invariably tell the desk clerk that only four of us would be staying in the room, in order to save money on extra occupant fees. Thus, two children were always forced to stay in the car while my parents filled out the necessary paperwork. Then, as we traveled to our room, those unacknowledged children would have to keep their heads down in the car and scurry into the room. Hey, ten bucks is ten bucks.
Do not take the cap off the radiator when the car overheats
Our cars generally performed well on these extremely long journeys across the country. But, inevitably, something would go wrong at some point on the trip. We had many memorable breakdowns. Once we came out of McDonalds, in a bad part of town near Washington, DC, to find a poorly timed flat tire. We had one car that intermittently got the shakes and started doing a back and forth chugging motion. But, most often, our car would simply overheat. When that happened, we would generally just pull over and let it cool down. Once, however, my father made the horrible mistake of unscrewing the radiator cap, to investigate the problem. He was rewarded with a scalding stream of water directly into his face. It is safe to say that no member of my family will ever, and I mean ever, unscrew a radiator cap again. That pained shriek still rings in my ears.
