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I am sorry excited to report that next week is Spring Break here in our part of Illinois, and unfortunately happily for us that means Family Vacation! This year's debate on where to go was particularly fraught with disagreement lively, partly because support for a real "family vacation" was what my siblings and I received from my parents for Christmas this year.
In a letter recognizing how busy each of our families are, my parents gave each of us a gift that would contribute to a vacation just for our own immediate families, which was incredibly thoughtful. As I've mentioned in previous posts, my father is a lawyer, so there was one stipulation—we needed to provide some photographic evidence of having actually gone somewhere (though if we chose to go away without our kids, he preferred that the photographs be taken during daylight hours only).
When I first read this letter, standing in the kitchen during the holiday craziness, all I saw was the word "vacation," and my immediate thought was, "I could go to Paris!" I had a lovely fantasy of myself wearing a striped boatneck top, flinging open a window overlooking the Champs-Elysees (see Sex and the City, Season 6, Part 2). Then I heard a crunching noise in the background—someone driving a toy truck over the crumb-covered tiles on the kitchen floor—and I realized, "Oh, right. The trip would include THEM."
So instead of my husband taking our three boys camping and me staying home all by myself, which has been our past idyllic Spring Break arrangement, we are traveling to Niagara Falls. And yes, we know it's going to be cold (one of the parents at daycare actually asked Martin if the falls would be "frozen over"), we know it's touristy, and that the American side is very seedy.
But our 11-year old really wants to go and we want to support his idea. The alternative was "camping our way" to the Grand Canyon, which is about 14,000 miles from here, and no matter how many conversations I had with my sister trying to convince myself that camping in March under any circumstances, let alone with all three boys along some sketchily planned out route, where the main breaks would be getting back into the car would be "a fun adventure," I just knew that either our lives or our marriage, and very possibly both, would be at stake should that scenario come to pass.
So it's Niagara Falls, which has the potential to be quite a lot of fun: we're driving in two days, breaking up our trip around Lake Huron, which will be lovely; it will be completely great to see the Falls, especially at night, and also from that boat where you can go behind them; there will be no camping involved; and the whole thing will be over in seven days and we can come home, having successfully completed our mission of a "family vacation."
I was about to write that "it's not as though I don't enjoy traveling with my family," but as my fingers were moving, I realized that is exactly what it's like. I don't. I love them, I have fun with them (we have a particularly enjoyable family dance ritual going right now to the song "Down"), and I value them as human beings. But I don't like to travel with them. I'm afraid that sentence is going to have to stand as is. And the truth is that this has always been the case for me, even on family vacations growing up.
There was the disastrous 1980 beach camping vacation in Duck, NC, for example, when it was 135 degrees and my parents got to sleep in an air conditioned pop-top camper while my siblings and I slept in a tent with 3 inches of sand and flypaper. And we all got to sit on the beach staring at the ocean which was off-limits because of a shark warning. You had to walk about a quarter of a mile to go to the bathroom, and the evening campground activity involved clogging, which I had never heard of before and never need to see again.
But the problem has never really been the destinations; the problem is me. I'm not proud of it. On that NC beach vacation, I spent a good deal of time in the pop-top blowing drying my hair. In August. At the beach.
The reality is that it takes me a while to adjust to new places, I can be sort of a princess about comfort, and
