There are families that vacation well. They consult travel agents and pore over maps. Before getting behind the wheel, they have already made complicated GPS calculations involving miles per hour and miles per gallon. These families check Yelp for hotel reviews instead of relying on the hotel website fish-eye photos that make all hotel rooms look bigger and brighter than they are. Their motel rooms are always on the bottom floor and never smell like cigarettes.
If they travel by car, it is by well-maintained car. There are no mysterious rattling noises that can only be fixed by turning up the radio volume. No one puts bare stinky feet on the dashboard by the air conditioning vent, sending noxious fumes throughout the car. The back seat is wide enough that two children can sit in it without touching each other or breathing one another’s oxygen. Families that vacation well never hear, “Make him stop looking at me!” in a high-pitched whine from the back seat.
Families that vacation well take amazing photos. No picture is ruined by closed eyes, and everyone sucks their stomachs in. No one is blindingly pale nor sunburned a fiery red. In stunning photos, champion vacationers capture the breaking wave, the erupting geyser, the nuzzling giraffe. Their sunrises and sunsets don’t need a filter.
Some of us, however, are haphazard vacationers. We plan camping trips on the spur of the moment, bringing along only a Styrofoam cooler, a case of Cup of Noodles, a saucepan, cereal, milk and bowls. We forget spoons, don’t own flashlights, and borrow matches from people at neighboring campsites. We pull the seats out of the minivan and sleep on the floor nestled among blankets, cramped like cigarettes in a box.
Even as we gain camping experience, even as we buy or inherit camping gear, we forget something crucial every single trip. We take toddlers to the forest but forget the diaper bag and spend the night in fear of an accident in the sleeping bag. We sit around a wooden table at nighttime in Yosemite without lanterns. We prepare carne asada but bring neither tortillas nor a knife with which to cut it. Sometimes we bring the tortillas but forget the salsa.
We go to the desert when it’s too windy to light a fire and too hot to breathe. We go to the forest when it’s toe-numbingly cold. Our tents, we discover one night during a rainstorm, are not entirely waterproof.
Sometimes we splurge and stay in motels or hotels. Deals on Living Social or Groupon look amazing and we buy them, realizing too late that of course motel rooms are half-price in Borrgeo Springs in July, because no one in their right mind vacations in 108-degree weather. One long night is spent in a Motel 6 on the wrong side of Portland, in a room sandwiched between smokers and a lady who apparently lives in the motel with her three cats. In Los Angeles, where I mistakenly assumed a hotel room would be easy to find even without reservations, we sleep across the street from the Hyatt, in a cramped smelly room, sleeping with one eye open to watch for cockroaches.
We are the family that enters even nice hotels with a cooler full of food. It’s hard to look surreptitious carrying grocery bags of white bread, cans of tuna, and jars of peanut butter and jelly, but we clutch our can openers and cucumbers and try to slip through the lobby unnoticed. We pick lodgings with refrigerators and microwaves; we use the in room coffee-makers to heat water for Cup of Noodles.
Still, among the calamities, there are golden moments of grace. Going slightly over the speed limit on a highway free of traffic, singing all eight minutes and 16 seconds of “American Pie” at top volume, as trees line our peripheral vision, is nothing short of perfection. Stumbling into a motel that has a basket of snacks and a bottle of water on the bedside table and hearing one of the kids gasp, “Oh, I love motels!” makes the drive worth it.
When eagles wheeling overhead and deer scattered along the roadside inspire awe, when we pick wild blueberries off of bushes and pop them into our mouths, when firelight throws shadows against the trees, ugly motel rooms and endless tuna sandwiches and forgotten lanterns slide away into distant memory.
We dip our feet into rivers together, ignore the rocks under our sleeping bags, stare at stars. Our photos are blurry; they don’t hide sunburns, freckles, or closed eyes. Sometimes we remember to hold our stomachs in, but more often we don’t. It’s hard to miss the imperfections, but harder still to miss the wide bright smiles our haphazard vacations produce.
