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When we last left my "puke", the car was finally pulling out of the driveway for the last time and the vacation had officially begun. Dad was the driver, Mom was the navigator, and us three kids were wedged where ever we could fit due to the packing done by my father. I swear he didn't even factor us into the equation. I would be sitting on the hump, a suitcase ramming the back of my head, a cooler pressing into my "special place", and I was now expected to stay quiet and calm for the next 8 to 20 hours. Good luck with that Father!!!
Now on one occasion, I remember my Dad's worst fears coming to fruition. You remember me talking about how my Dad's whole worry was ANYONE finding out we were leaving on vacation and then breaking into our house and taking everything we owned? Well on this one occasion, we had just pulled out of the driveway and were pulling away from the house when my sister decided that this moment needed some emotion. She rolled down the window and proceeded to shout at the top of her lungs, "BYE HOUSE! BYE YARD! BYE TREES! BYE NEIGHBORHOOD! BYE EVERY ONE!!!" I'm truly surprised that my Dad did not get whiplash by how quick he spun around to stop this little spawn from announcing to the whole world that we were leaving. He then proceeded to panic for the next 20 minutes about who heard her shouting and he was sure they were already in our house stealing his Fruit of the Looms and Brill Cream. I think my Mom finally pointed out to him that it was 4 in the morning and there wasn't anyone up but us, so he finally dropped the club he was going to beat Alice with. DANG IT!!!!
I always wondered why my Dad would insist on leaving at some UN-GODLY hour, but now that I'm older, and have traveled with children, I finally understand it. ANY moment you can get your child to sleep in the car while on a vacation is bonus time. I'm really surprised that instead of water to drink on a trip for us kids, Mom didn't pack like 10 bottles of Nyquil to keep us "medicated" with. It was, however, a pretty traumatic time for a child to leave that early in the morning because it resembled something from either a prison movie or a boot camp movie. I would be sound asleep at 4 in the morning and then the lights in my room would come on and Mom would be telling me to go get in the car to leave. I would stagger like a zombie to my 6in x 6in seating spot on the hump and we would be in Pennsylvania before I finally gathered my senses and realized that we even left. Smart Mom and Dad. . . . . REAL SMART!!!!
Now as far as traveling as a kid, time seemed to move WAY slower than normal time. 8 hours of traveling in a car equaled a week to a child. Throw on top of that the cramped quarters as mentioned before, being shoulder to shoulder with your sworn enemies called your siblings, the lack of ANY form of entertainment, and I am truly surprised that we didn't read about kids going "Lord of the Flies" more and weeding out the herd. I can remember almost every vacation having that moment of insanity. The lack of mobility, entertainment, and having your brother's elbow in your ribs while your sister would accuse you of being on her side would drive me into a frenzy. I would either take to laughing like a madman, fighting both my brother and sister with no regard to my own safety, or singing "This Land is My Land" at the top of my lungs until I let the tension out. Don't ask about that whole singing thing please. I'm not proud of that one.
(Sounding like an old person alert) BEEEEEEEP
For those of you that might read my blog that are under 25, when I say no entertainment, I mean NO ENTERTAINMENT!!!!! We didn't have ANYTHING that resembled the Gameboy, PSP, I-Touch, I-Pod, DVD, or Cell phone. We couldn't lose ourselves in some electronic world that would make the time go faster. I was just on vacation a couple of weeks ago, and while I drove, my wife Linda was watching stuff on YouTube on her phone. Do you know how bad I would have killed to be able to see "Friday" by Rebecca Black just to dull the pain of sitting in a car smashed between my brother and sister with 7 1/2 hours still to go??? You kids have NO IDEA what it was like to have to find your own entertainment on a long car ride. It was sheer torture!!!!
(Old guy leaving now)
As younger kids, Dad would load the entire luggage into the back open area of the Country Squire station wagon, but as we got older, and crankier, he began leaving room in the back for the Alcatraz seat. For those of you that aren't familiar with the Alcatraz seat, let me explain why I call it this. Station wagons at that time, had a fold up seat in the trunk area of the automobile. Now where some station wagons had the bench seat that folded up and had you facing out the back of the vehicle, ours folded out in a manner that gave you two bench seats staring directly at each other looking out the side of the vehicle. I guess Ford decided that it was just plain rude for the child to stare out the back of the car at some poor motorist and chose to have the kid that was exiled to the Alcatraz seat to have to stare out the side of the car, which trust me when I say, you can't see ANYTHING INTERESTING. You don't even get to see all the cool billboards in the opposite direction that the kid that got to see while looking out the back window. THE VIEW SUCKED!!!!
The other reason I call it the Alcatraz seat is because there was usually a mountain of luggage in between you and the rest of the car so you truly felt like you were on an island when you were put back there. Oh, you could hear fun stuff happening from the front end of the car, but you couldn't see it or participate in it because of the lime green suitcase, red and white Igloo cooler, and the saliva stained pillows that were forming a barrier between you and the rest of the car. It was like solitary confinement for an 8 year old. Don't get me wrong, there were times that I enjoyed going back there to get away from my siblings, but you want to talk about boredom?
Then you also had to deal with the size of the seat. I'm not sure who they thought they were marketing this feature to, but you would pretty much have to put two babies back there if you wanted to use both bench seats. Each bench seat was like 3 ft long and 1 1/2 foot deep, but in between the seats for the leg room was like a whopping 8 INCHES. Take a moment to look at 8 inches on a ruler. Please tell me what two mutant kids are going to fit in that area comfortably???? It was like Ford didn't even try this feature out before they put it in this car. They just slapped it in and figured that the parents would figure it out. Heaven forbid you ever got in an accident with your kids in that back seat; safety was NOT an issue with this seat. . . . . WAIT A MINUTE!!!!! I think I just figured out why I was the first one they asked to go back there!!!!
Now that we got the seating out of the way, let's talk about the different dynamics that took place during the travel stage. First off, Dad was the driver. . . .PERIOD. Mom was the navigator. . . . PERIOD. Kids were a constant annoyance to parents . . . . . . PERIOD!!!
It was Dad's only goal to get to the destination in the quickest way possible. You didn't stop for stupid reasons like bathroom breaks or food, you ONLY stopped when you needed gas and everyone in the car had better synchronize their bladders to that cycle. Plus, back then, it was considered a treat if you stopped and got food while traveling from a fast food place. Mom would pack enough fruit and veggies to feed a dozen horses and rabbits and like twenty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for all our eating needs for the trip. Of course, after about the 6th hour of sitting in a cooler with those useless blue cool packs, the jelly would absorb into the peanut butter and you would be left with a mushy sandwich that tasted gross. So the less you dealt with Dad on these trips, the better it was for you in the long run. He was focused on getting us there with the least amount of stops as possible, and he was going to beat last years trip by at least 15 minutes.
Now Mom served two main roles on the trip. She was A) The navigator and B) the buffer between Dad and the kids. You see, long before GPS, you had the MRM (Map Reading Momma). How did this technological marvel work? First off, the MRM was voice activated!!!!! Dad would say where we were going and then Mom would pull out the maps and figure out how we were going to get there. Once again for you younger folks, there were huge sheets of paper that would have lines all over them that showed where all the roads were in a state. And when I say huge. . . . I'm not kidding. I would watch Mom unfold the map and pretty soon almost the entire windshield would be covered up with only a little square left for Dad to see out of to drive. Mom would bark out directions and then try to re-fold the map back into its original form, but that was NEVER going to happen. She would fight the map for like a minute or two, let out an exasperated groan, and then scrunch it together into something that had NO resemblance to the map that was there a minute ago. Of course, as soon as she shoved it under the seat, Dad would ask her to repeat the directions again because he wasn't listening. That's when Mom picked up that club he was going to beat Alice with earlier.
Mom's second job though was much more important. She had to be that buffer between Dad and us kids. I swear there was a blinking light somewhere on the car's dashboard that would flash when Dad was getting aggravated with us kids and putting us in the danger zone. That light would flash and Mom would snap into action by either distracting us kids by pointing out some landmark that we were missing, have us switch seats or exile one of us to Alcatraz, or she would have us sing a song on the spur of the moment. It was like we lived in one of those TV musicals where at the drop of a hat, everyone would break out into a song. I guess it's true that music soothes the savage beast because how she managed to get Dad from killing us sometimes is beyond me. This was Mom's most important role or we would have come home with less people then we left with on a couple of occasions!!!!
We kids, however, took great pride on how much chaos we could create from our little niche in the car and being that we had no real role in the trip, we could put our whole focus on creating that chaos. No matter what time we left, the same thing would happen about 15 minutes into every trip. We would get bored!!! Now boredom could play itself out in SO MANY WAYS in the confines of the car. It could be very simple or mighty complex, but there was no chance we weren't going to make it known that we needed entertainment and we needed it NOW!!!
It would usually start simple between us kids. My brother would lean against me which would push the cooler further into my "special place". I would get annoyed and lean towards my sister to compensate for my brother's rude behavior. She would then lean back into me, pushing against my weight, which in turn would push me back into my brother. He would sense my pushing and lean harder against me until I became a book titled "How to Squish Your Brother", and this book was in between those two stupid bookends called my brother and sister. We would test the waters with each other by fighting for an extra two inches to place our tushies, until one of us would finally snap and throw the first grenade in the "Let's Hack off the Folks" war of 1975. Whoever snapped first, usually my sister, would tattle on whoever they wanted to get into trouble first, which was usually me. "Mom! Scott's leaning on me." to which I would have to defend myself by saying, "Well Mark's leaning on me." to which Mark would play the innocent one and say, "No I'm not." Of course I wasn't going to let this bold faced lie go, so I would have to call him out on it. "He's lying Mom!!! He won't get off me." Then Mark would lean harder against me to make his point and Alice would shove back at me until we would be locked in a battle that no one was going to win. "EVERYONE GET IN YOUR OWN SPOT!!!" Mom would bellow, because there was no way she wanted Dad involved this early on in the trip. We would settle back down for the moment.
For the next few hours we would go from getting along with each other to wanting to kill each other. The worst was when someone decided to "break wind" in such an enclosed area. You were cheek to cheek away from the offending party and they would make sure to raise that cheek in your direction to add to the vapor trail. Of course, the person that did it would bust out laughing while the other two proceeded to hold their breath, wave their hands away from their nose, and tell on the cheek raising stink pot. "Mom! Scott left off a stinker." It was about this time that the smell reached the front seat and Mom and Dad were now involved whether you wanted them to be or not. All the windows would come down and Mom would make a blanket statement like, "If you have to have gas, just hold it."
When we finally got tired of attacking each other, we would turn our attention on Mom with a barrage of questions. "How much longer?" "When are we going to get there?" "When are we going to eat?" "Can we stop and see the World’s Largest Yarn ball?" "What are we going to do when we get there?" "Can we stop so I can pee?" "Can I crawl in the back?" "Why is Dad's vein sticking out of his forehead?”, were all part of the question period of the trip. All three of us had questions, and we wanted answers dang it!!!! Mom would have to field each and every one of those questions as quickly as possible to once again keep Dad focused on the trip. "About 2 hours more." "In about 2 hours." "Do you want a mushy sandwich?" "No." "See your Grandma." "You should have gone an hour ago when we stopped for gas." "If you can find room go ahead." "Because you are asking too many questions and he's close to pulling the car over and killing all three of you." She would answer them all keeping the buffer between us and Dad.
The last part I will talk about on the travel stage is that if we were going to Florida, it meant we would get to stay in a motel at least one night. That was the ultimate experience for a kid. It didn't matter what time at night we pulled into that motel, the first thing out of our mouths when we arrived was, "CAN WE GO SWIMMING???" It didn't matter if it was midnight, 50 degrees outside, and the pool was green, we wanted it so bad we could taste it. There was not enough "No's" in my parent's vocabularies that was going to dissuade us from getting in that pool and they knew it, so they would just say "Yes" and get it over with. We would swim for as long as they would let us, for this is what the vacation was all about. Swimming late at night, going into the freezing motel room, going to sleep three in a bed, waking up at the crack of dawn, putting back on that freezing bathing suit that would make any male an instant girl, and swimming until Dad declared that it was time to get back on the road again. Getting to stay one night in a motel made all the smells, cramped quarters, pushy siblings, gross food, and even the Alcatraz seat worth every painful moment. It was even better than staying at relatives houses because we didn't even have to pick up the towels. I will always remember the greatness that was the motel back in those days.
I could drag this on even further because I still have so many memories from the traveling part of the vacation, but due to length, I will stop it right there. I hope I was able to drag a few memories out of you during this read and I will be tackling the next stage of the vacation in my next "puke". . . . . The Destination!!!
SMILE!!!!
1 comment:
You are def right about not having entertainment... I had a cassette player, tapes & a book... WOW!! Those WERE the days... :)
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