Are We There Yet?

As this summer winds to a close, I’m remembering those long ago summer family vacations. My coworker just returned from Disneyworld where she enjoyed a full week of all inclusive hospitality with her entire family. From what she’s said, they had a marvelous time. My family never went to Disney. Usually, our family vacation had one of two possible destinations. We were either going up to the northern part of Wisconsin to a place called Rustic Lodge or we were going to North Dakota and/or Iowa to visit family.

No matter where we ended up it was the getting there part of the vacation that was the true adventure. My mother would plan for weeks what to pack and how to pack it so it would all fit in the confines of our luggage carrier which my dad strapped snugly to the roof of our Rambler/Ambassador/Javelin (whichever car we had at the time – all of the American Motors gems). There were earlier cars too but I was too little to remember them now. There are 6 kids in my family and somehow mom knew exactly what we would need for our week on the road. Right down to the shoes. She’d also have our traveling clothes picked out and there was no arguing with her. The day before we’d leave she’d spend half the day in the kitchen making sandwiches and packing them into a shoe box with some fruit or windmill cookies. If we were lucky there would be some red licorice thrown in there too. This box road “up front” with her so she could monitor what was being eaten and when. One time we were well on the road when she started digging around for the box. There were some choice words when it was discovered that the box was packed in the trunk. This meant my dad, the one to blame for this error, had to pull over and dig it out which apparently made us lose valuable travel time. That was another thing, travel time was logged as surely as if we working for NASA and on some grand space mission. Distance from our house to Auntie Hazel’s in Iowa was measured in hours and when we arrived it was the first topic of discussion and inevitably someone would say, “My, you made pretty good time!”

With all of us on board the Rambler/Ambassador/Javelin, no matter how large, didn’t quite have enough room for how we all wanted to travel – which was horizontally. As soon as we all got in the car we started vying for space to lie down. This was in the days before seatbelt or car seat laws. Heck, I don’t think our car even had seatbelts in the back seat! As the baby of the family, I rode “up front” in between my mom and dad or on my mom’s lap. No car seat for me! The rest of the hoard got stuck in back, all arms and legs, trying to lie down. Usually, someone would end up on the floor with their body perched uncomfortably over the “hump” and someone would end up on top of the back seat lying down in the window. Seriously! Try that these days! They’d have my parents in jail for that! Haha! Of course, my sister had to always be near the window with the window open. She was always car sick and we left a pile of puke in many towns between Kenosha and Niche, North Dakota. One year, she made it even more special by breaking out with boils on her rear end. She had to sit by looking miserable at the side of the motel pool while the rest of us cooled down after a long day of traveling in a un-air conditioned car.

My dad had a knack for making these trips memorable. If mom had her way we’d never stop for anything, including bathroom breaks. Dad, on the other hand, loved to “see the sights” as he called it. He’d see a billboard for some upcoming local attraction and we were off to see whatever it was. I can happily recall seeing the Prairie Dog Museum, the Corn Palace and Wall Drug. We even drove through the very south eastern part of Montana once just to say we did it. It was a long stretch of alkaline back roads that were occasionally blocked by someone’s cattle looking at us as if we were aliens. We went through the Teddy Roosevelt Animal Park in the high heat of an August day. We had to have the windows rolled up per the park’s rules (wild animals, don’t ya know…) and as we sweltered inside we strained to see any animals at all. They were all so hot they were hidden deep inside their dens or in the dense forest. I don’t think we actually saw anything wilder than a chipmunk that day! On another trip we stopped at something called Thomas’ Music Box Museum. It was just that….no false advertising there! Some guy named Thomas had a lot of music boxes so he put them in a shed and called it a museum. Every stop was a photo op which in my family meant we lined up by the Rambler/Ambassador/Javelin and took a picture. I don’t recall seeing any pictures of the actual sights themselves.

Eventually, we arrived at our destination and it was always fun to be there too. But the getting there was half the fun and some of the best times will always be those of me and my siblings fussing and pushing and “I’m not touching you”-ing, as we made our way to great childhood memories.