It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was family vacation and hindsight being twenty twenty they really were the best times. For me these trips were marked by the music of Bruce Springsteen and the crowded backseat of a vacation car rental. It was elbow fights with my brothers and noticing different state license plates with my father. It was the smell of a car you hadn’t been in until this very long trip. Subsequently it was compounding that smell with the fragrance of McDonald’s french fries.
I loved going on vacations. We went to many places when I was a kid. Hershey Park in Pennsylvania for a factory tour and a trip to their awesome amusement park. There was my grandfather’s summer house in Cape Cod, with it’s beautiful beaches and excellent shell fish. There was Ohio, which was mostly boring but we had family out there, not to mention Bob Evans’ sausage gravy.
Family vacations are a great way to remind the family that when all is said and done, if you find yourself in rural Ohio in the middle of the summer family is all you have. I don’t know if that was the point but I know that when I have kids I plan to load them into a vacation car rental and teach them the same lesson.
