Being a parent isn't hard enough. That's why some brilliant mind instituted mandatory annual periods of increased difficulty to bump the challenge rating to nightmare mode. What's better than raising kids at home? Raising them in a strange place where everything costs three times more than it should and you have a time limit to have fun or else. Oh, and you're burning precious leave from work while you do it. Welcome to the family vacation, the bane of parents’ existence since the dawn of time. Yes, cavemen and women took vacations, too. They left their caves to go hang out by the beach, where they were eaten by early proto-whales that still had legs. Natural selection has always favored those who stayed home.
Recently, my wife Lola announced that it was that wonderful time of year when we need to make plans for how we're going to stress out and spend a bunch of money in the name of having a good time. I took her idea to the extreme, as I do with all of her suggestions. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing with malicious compliance to annoy your spouse. By the next day, I had an extensive list of all the things we could do in the coming months. Lola hated nearly everything I'd typed out. That's how I knew it was a good list. Family vacations should cause friction right from the jump. The biggest issue was the timing. I dislike going places for multiple nights. My ideal vacation is a day trip. We drive there and back without paying for lodging, and if possible, food. Picnic lunches are a great way to enjoy the outdoors while disguising the fact that you're the cheapest human being ever to live. Lola, on the other hand, prefers to go places for a week at a time. That requires extensive travel—you're probably not going to pay for a week of hotel rooms a short drive from home unless you're on the run from the law—and also entirely too much packing. Taking one child out of the house for a night requires approximately a hundred cubic feet of cargo. Multiply that by four kids and two parents and we’d need an entire wagon train to go to St. Louis, let alone Oregon. Making it all the way out West would require a freight train loaded with food, clothing, and large stockpiles of medication for dysentery. I assume that's still a problem today. The highest concentration of rest stops in the world is along the interstate leading into Portland.
Lola prefers to take multiple days off at a time because it's easier for scheduling purposes at her lab. She’s kind of a big deal, and people miss her when she's gone. If you think our house falls apart when she's away, you should see her place of business. They text her at all hours of the day and night, regardless of if she's on vacation, a phenomenon to which I simply can't relate. I barely reply to non-crisis text messages even in the middle of the day when it’s completely appropriate. I still haven't responded to the one Lola sent me two Thursdays ago. No, I didn't remember to get milk. As a result, we had a clash of short and long vacation ideas. Figuring out which approach to take would require nuance and compromise. Just kidding. We went with Lola's idea.
With the duration determined, all that was left to do was decide when and where to go. So basically we still had ninety-nine percent of the vacation planning left to fight about. Last year, Lola and I treated ourselves to a kid-free river cruise down the Rhine. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, which, when you’re a parent, comes with once-in-a-lifetime levels of guilt. We felt bad about leaving the kids behind with my parents. Not bad enough to cancel the trip, and certainly not bad enough to pay my mom and dad for babysitting, but bad enough to try to make it up to the kids the following year. To our girls, the ultimate vacation would be a trip to Disney World. I thought perhaps this would be the year to finally go through with it. Then I actually looked into the logistics. It was a no-go right from step one. For starters, half of the children are terrified of the idea of flying, even though they’ve never been on an airplane. I could help them defeat their fear, or I could just embrace it and save money. Driving to Florida isn't really an option, though, even though people in Indiana do it all the time. It takes two days of travel time in each direction. On the drive down there, you at least have the excitement of what lies ahead. On the drive back, all you have is thoughts of how you wish you were dead. When you factor in how much gas costs and how many flights there are from Indianapolis to Florida, it really doesn't cost much more to fly than to drive. Add in the time savings and flying is a no-brainer. If we wanted to do Disney World, we'd have to traumatize our children for the sake of efficiency and get them airborne. That wouldn't be so bad for me, but it would be hell for the kids and for the passengers around them. I’d make sure my seat was at least ten rows away.
Then there was the price of Disney World itself. It costs approximately sixty billion dollars per hour. That's only a slight exaggeration. Figuring out how to combine food, travel, and lodging deals so as to be gouged to the smallest extent possible is a full-time job. Half the internet is just guides for how to get a good deal at Disney World, and researching them all would require you to get a PhD in recreational travel. On top of all that, my kids hate rides. Adrenaline burns them like fire. After we flew halfway across the country and paid our life savings for tickets and two rooms at a mouse-themed resort, the kids wouldn’t have anything to do. They won’t get on any ride that goes up, down, or forward with any degree of speed. The jury is still out on backwards. That would leave princess visits. The kids hate walking places and standing in line, and every day at Disney World is just a twelve-mile death march with a two-hour queue at the end. The older kids are too advanced for princesses, and the younger ones are too impatient and fragile to survive the line to see them. Much to my relief, Lola agreed that Disney World was out. We'd have to ease our residual parental guilt in a much cheaper way, which is the best way of all.
For an alternative but equally long trip, Lola suggested that we drive out West to visit my brother Harry. He has a baby we’ve never met. Harry is still at the stage where he's adding to his family while I'm at the one where I’m eagerly waiting for mine to grow up and move out. Seeing Harry would be nice, but I talk to him for two or three hours every week while playing Halo over Xbox Live. I know everything going on with his life, and it’s just as boring as mine. We’re old enough that our best stories are about serious injuries we sustained while doing non-serious things. Remind me to tell you the one about how I pulled a hamstring while yawning.
I also wasn't sure what we would do once we got out there. We would probably sit around and have a few drinks, which is what we do remotely every weekend during Halo night. The experience wouldn’t be substantially different if I could hear his baby crying in the next room rather than through an Xbox headset. His city doesn't really offer a ton to offer, either. That's where I ran into an existential crisis about the homogeneity of America. It doesn't matter how far you drive or fly. The country is pretty much identical all the way across. It's the same alcohol and the same fast food chains and the same shows to stream on Netflix when you get bored with talking to each other. I doubt the Walmarts out West are substantially different than the ones in Indiana, although they might have armadillos instead of racoons digging through their dumpsters. Not that any place else is much better. Europe is beautiful, but by the time you see your sixteenth cathedral, they all start to look the same. I’m a savant at not appreciating the world around me, and it saves me a ton of money on travel. Being embarrassingly uncultured has its perks.
That's when I decided to drill down into the essence of what makes a good vacation, not for me, but for the kids. My ideal trip is just one where the kids don't fight or complain. I said “ideal,” not “realistic.” When I listen to the kids talk about past experiences, though, a few things always come up. Their best memories never have anything to do with how far we traveled or how much money we spent. The top things they always remember are pizza, ice cream, and pools. Combine all three for the perfect day, and put together three days like that for the perfect vacation. That's why the kids always love going up to my aunt's house in Minneapolis for the Fourth of July. While it’s a long drive, once we get there, it's just an entire day of hanging out in the pool surrounded by infinite snacks. There are perks to having all your aunts and uncles also be grandparents.
Our annual trip to visit our friends Rocco and Phoebe in Wisconsin offers many of the same upsides. They live on a river and are a short drive from a lake, both of which are just pools it’s okay to pee in. We also load the boat with fifty pounds of snacks per person. It’s a safety issue. If the boat sinks, all the extra fat will help us float. This year, I finally had the brilliant epiphany that, when driving from Indiana, Wisconsin is on the way to Minneapolis. Instead of making two separate trips, we could cut our driving time in half by combing them into a single week-long vacation and also meet Lola’s duration requirement without ever paying for a single hotel room. I'm the smartest man alive, or I would be if it didn’t take me years to finally realize I could connect two trips that are literally right next to each other.
That got my creative juices flowing. It’s easier for Lola to take off large blocks of time than small blocks of time, but what if she didn’t have to take off any time at all? I set out to squeeze an adventure into a regular-length weekend. Besides junk food and pools, the kids’ favorite thing in the world is their unrelated, unofficial uncle Greg. We play Halo with him every Friday night, and the girls think he's the best. Why? They see him a couple times a year at birthday parties, and that's it. He shows up with presents and candy, plays with them, and then disappears for six months. He exists entirely in a twilight realm of fun devoid of discipline or consequences, as any good non-uncle should. I proposed a weekend trip to hang out with Greg in Chicago. Originally, I was just going to have us all walk around a museum together in deference to my inherent lameness, but Greg offered to host a sleepover at his house to extend the fun for a second day. Now the plan is to go to one of the world’s largest arcades on day one and the museum on day two. We have a Raspberry Pi at home with thousands of classic games (consequently, that was also a gift from Greg), but there's something special about going to a place where all the pixelated heroes and villains are trapped in giant, colorful cabinets that eat your quarters like candy. Best of all, once you pay a flat admission fee, all the games are free. That’s a huge savings when it only takes you a few seconds to die. I’m not saying the games are too hard, but I can see why Mr. and Mrs. Pacman are now divorced. There will also be concession stand junk food, plus alcohol for the adults, which should make the inevitable whining easier to deal with. Obviously we’ll end the day with pizza and ice cream, which is the only thing the kids will remember after the fact. The next morning, we’ll head to the museum and pretend to learn something. It should be free since we have a membership at an affiliated facility in Indiana, so if the kids want to zone out for the whole day, I’ll still get my money’s worth. The whole weekend will probably cost us less than two hundred bucks. That's my idea of the perfect vacation. It will be the kids’ idea of a perfect one, too, as long as they never find out this is what we’re doing in place of Disney World. Don’t you dare tell them.
Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Catch you next time.
James
Vacation for the Ages