Notes: Forced to Have Fun: Vacations With Kids
WHEN OUR daughter was not quite three, we took her to Disneyland. We were worried she might be too young, but we were staying in Los Angeles and we couldn’t think of anything else to do, so why not? When we asked her later what her favorite part of Disneyland had been, she said, “The horse.” It turned out that she meant the coin-operated merry-go-round in front of the Kmart where we had stopped briefly on our way to Anaheim.
You can never tell what’s going to make an impression on a child. One of the few things I remember about the 1964 World’s Fair, to which my parents took my sister and me when she was six and I was nine, was getting caught in the closing doors of a Manhattan subway train. I wasn’t scared. I just had the vaguely happy feeling that I was going to be getting a lot of attention pretty soon. It was the same feeling I had had a year or two earlier when, more or less on purpose, I had fallen through the thin ice at the edge of a pond while skating.
Like virtually all the vacations I took as a child, that trip to the World’s Fair was a car trip. We lived in Kansas City, and getting to New York took two full days. I have fond memories of the car. It was a 1964 Buick Skylark station wagon, and it had a little window in the roof above the back seat. My sister and I were excited about the prospect of looking at the tops of skyscrapers through that roof window. The car also had brown vinyl seats on which it was easy to make lick lines. A lick line is a saliva boundary, drawn with your finger, that shows your sister exactly how close to you she can get without being punched. (This was in the days when almost no one wore seat belts, so trespassing was a problem.) Maintaining a lick line requires contributions from both parties, as in the famous Robert Frost poem about walls.
Our car must have seemed practically empty during that trip, be-
cause we had left my one-and-a-halfyear-old brother at home. The summer before, though, we had taken him with us to northern Michigan in a car that was smaller and didn’t have air-conditioning. Also, a college-aged baby-sitter had come with us. How did we survive? Last year my wife and I briefly considered taking both our cars on a 250-mile trip to Martha’s Vineyard, because we didn’t see how we could possibly cram ourselves, our two kids, and all our stuff into just a minivan.
The best part of traveling in a car is getting out of the car and checking into a motel. After a long day’s drive nearly everything about a motel seems interesting and life-affirming. Once, when I was seven or eight, my sister and I talked our father into letting us try the vibrating bed in our motel room. He put in a quarter, and the bed began to shake. It also began to make a sound that was like the sound of a vacuum cleaner being fed slowly into a Cuisinart. The control box didn’t have an off switch; it was wired directly into the wall and couldn’t be unplugged. The bed either shook all night or seemed to shake all night, and my sister and I fought about who got to lie on it.
DESPITE THE logistical difficulties, I like traveling with children. It forces you to do the things you really enjoy (buying souvenirs, going to Disneyland, eating at Wendy’s) and to skip the things you really don’t (going to plays, touring the wine country, looking at art). Keeping your kids from slitting each other’s throats compels you to find activities that are actually interesting, as opposed to merely sounding like the kinds of activities people engage in when they are on vacation.
Traveling with children also reminds you that you can find fun almost anywhere you go. Some of my happiest vacation memories involve a trip my family took with several other families when I was ten or eleven years old. We all stayed in a nice motel, went swimming, played miniature golf, and so on. The really great thing about the trip was that the motel was only ten miles away from where we all lived. Driving there took fifteen minutes. Nobody had to throw up or go to the bathroom, and nobody asked when we would be there. The kids had an entire motel to run around in, and the parents had plenty of time for cocktails. The next day, before lunch, we went home.
—David Owen