Family Road Trips

If you are lucky you have many memories of family road trips growing up.  Whether you loved them or you hated them, you were definitely making memories.  People 40 and over probably remember lying in the back window while your siblings were arguing over the imaginary line that keeps them on their own side of the back seat (no one buckled of course).  Dad complaining about bathroom stops, Mom delivering snacks, the constant rolling down of the window and blaming your brothers for the lovely smells that occasionally arise. My poor youngest brother who sat up front between my parents was never allowed to stretch without my other brother and me tickling his armpits (which would result in his whining and our complete denial of any wrongdoing). We didn’t have headsets to listen to IPods or DVD players to watch movies on and couldn’t communicate with our friends with cell phones.  In fact we couldn’t talk to our friends until we got back home from our trip – long distance phone calls from land lines was not an option we were allowed or would even have thought to ask about.  We were stuck with books and drawing, playing the sign game, mooing at cows, and listening to whatever lucky AM station your parents could find that had music from the 50s and 60s.  The highlights were the hotel swimming pools, the occasional water park, miniature golfing, stopping to look at the monuments or walk through museums, visiting people that you don’t remember knowing and if we were really lucky we’d get to hit an amusement park.   Some of the drives were actually more memorable than the places we were visiting.

As my husband, three daughters and I were taking a 5 hour trip to visit our son in college and see him in a play this past weekend, I actually had a crazy moment of reflection.  We were about an hour into the trip and I felt very relaxed.  I had made sure all five of us were packed with every possible necessity, clothes,  jackets, pillows, blankets, “just in case” medication, toiletries,  snacks, drinks and a care package for my son.  I had made sure the car was in good working order with filled tires and a tankful of gas.  I made sure we had plenty of cash, had booked hotel rooms, gotten the play tickets for my son’s play, and had programmed our destination into our navigation system.  I had also made arrangements for our dogs, our mail, our paper, and had talked to my daughters’ schools to have them excused early.  I also made sure to pick up the house so we wouldn’t come home to a stressful mess or nothing to eat when we got home.  All this preparation for a 3 day trip!  As a child I never once considered the preparation my mom did for all of us to go – never once!    I suddenly questioned myself.  Did I ever thank my mom for taking care of all of this so we could have fun trips?  Did I ever thank my dad for all the thousands of miles he drove us and used his savings to give my brothers and I vacations that he had never taken as a child? I never thought that my parents had to do any planning.  I just thought we had to go!  The torch was handed down without any explanation.   We are helping make memories for our kids like our parents did for us.     As I was white knuckling the glove box handle on the way home as my husband drove us through freezing rain with me continually asking him to slow down through the windy mountainous roads, I looked back at my blissfully sleeping and reading daughters and wondered if my parents had ever worried about our safety driving us in similar situations. 

As we pulled into our driveway and unloaded the car and began to do numerous loads of laundry my girls were happy to be home but were talking about how much fun they had seeing their brother.  They loved the Mexican restaurant we ate at that had terrible and over-priced food.  They giggled about the laundromat we went to take their brother’s laundry to that we had to take out of the dryer too early in order to get to his play on time.  Their favorite time of the whole weekend had been sitting in our hotel room and laughing with our entire family as Dad told their brother how obnoxious his sisters had acted in the grocery store.  Seeing everybody laugh and enjoy each other is what makes it all worth it.  It doesn’t matter if you drive to Disneyland,  the Grand Canyon or an overnight campground, family trips are priceless.  Family road trips – precious gifts that teach you to keep on giving.