Old time family vacation

Last Saturday morning, far too early in the young day, I was awake but trying to go back to sleep.  Too soon to get up for a weekend, I felt something familiar but from way back.  It took me a while to identify what I was remembering, but then it occurred to me that the birdsongs, the warm and quiet breeze, the stretching of an awakening morning, the lack of road sounds, the summerness of it all was taking me to a time when I was younger than 12.  Leaving from a week’s vacation in Utah, getting a head start on a promised roaster, as we headed south on I-15.

In the early years it was the station wagon; later, the van.  Both made me slightly nervous as we crossed Death Valley in the middle of summer in the heat of the day as we traveled back to San Diego from our annual pilgrimage to visit our cousins and aunt and uncle in Utah.  I wondered what would happen to us if we overheated, which seems like it was more of a thing back then?

My dad was an upholster and my mom worked in a bank.  We had a one-week family vacation a year, and this was it.  Nearly every other day of the year my two sisters and I went to year-round school and daycare.  There was an occasional day when daycare was closed and we’d have to go spend the day with someone from church or our grandma.  My mom did have a week off at Christmas, and I loved having a stay-at-home even as temporary as it was. But this was the highlight of our year.

Embarking on our trip, leaving from San Diego on a Friday night, the idea was for my mom to get off a little early so we could get out of town and head north at a decent hour.  Year after year this was the first argument of the trip.  My dad refused to prepare before we were all loaded in the vehicle.  We needed to gas up and pick up a new pair of sunglasses.  It was usually 6 p.m. by this time.  Grandma packed us food.  Celery and peanut butter wrapped in wax paper in a shoebox is the only part I can remember besides soda.  But we never ate it, which is why I have no idea what else we had on board.  We did pick up Mama Lina’s sandwiches from the deli across the busy street from our apartment: luscious subs on homemade bread with precisely the right amount of oil and vinegar dripping into the paper wrap.  The second argument of the trip was that a man needed a hot meal.  Requiring a pit stop to get a burger within an hour or so of us commencing our trip. 

An additional argument would be the air conditioning.  My dad would point it directly on himself even as we were sweltering in the back of the long station wagon or van.  Then he’d get cold and turn it off altogether.  Maybe vents for the backs of vehicles hadn’t been invented back then, but it was a constant battle.

I remember stopping in Las Vegas for gas en route.  It was, of course, dark but surreal, like opening the door to a hairdryer.  Such heat I’d never felt the likes of especially not at night.  And the lights.  It was like another world, so luminous and beckoning.  As sleepy as we may have been, this was a diversion we never wanted to miss.  So stimulating, such a thrill for us to be in such a strange land, a visual reminder that we were inching closer to our eventual destination.

What we did to occupy ourselves, I have no idea.  I just know we traveled into the darkening abyss until we docked in Mesquite, Nevada, around midnight to lodge overnight.  These were the days of optional seat belts and the rows of seats being folded to create a generous platform for sleeping or lounging.  You certainly have heard the tales, if not lived them.

We’d straggle to our motel room hours past our regular bedtime.  In olden-day establishments that might not have been reputable even then. Emblazoned in my mind was a time when we opened up the door with the key, turned on the lights, and watched the orange carpet emerge as a million or more cockroaches scurried to their hiding spots: brown to orange flooring appearing in seconds.  A challenge for a sleepy young mind to interpret for sure.  My dad marched right back to the office and asked if there was an extra charge for the cockroaches and took us elsewhere.  Can you even imagine what the bedbug situation might have been?  The bedspreads were original floral sorts.  That stale cigarette stench impregnated walls, upholstery, and carpet.  And yet even now old bowling alleys and antique shops with that same smell sort of transport me back to nights like this with my family.

We’d sleep soundly—as we all do in those perfectly climatized rooms with cold, loud air conditioning and thick, heavy, full-coverage curtains darkening out the light from both night and day on the other side.  But we always awoke full of anticipation, eager to be on our way to meet up with our cousins.  We were so close.

But this was always another of the difficulties of the trip.  My mom would be up early, dressed and ready for the day; we girls would follow suit.  But my dad slept.  He argued that he’d been up driving all night; couldn’t a man get some sleep?  I have to laugh now, but I can’t imagine the frustration both my parents felt.

But breakfast in Dixie called, of all things, Dick’s Diner, eventually smoothed things over, as diners have a tendency to do. Mom ordered eggs benedict (whatever that is) and the rest of us would have pancakes.  After breakfast, we would go to the little gift shop that was part of the diner, which is exactly weird now that I think about it.  I’d buy postcards or a glass animal for my collection or a plastic Indian doll, a tiny stuffed koala that I named Timmy.  My youngest sister would buy one of those bottles with a penny in it or a cheap little coin purse with beads on it.

We stopped for burgers for lunch, my middle sister always ordered one with ketchup and lettuce only.  My dad wanted a malt but always complained that they weren’t like the ones in the 50s; he wanted one thin enough to drink with a straw.  We were always embarrassed.  But now that I’m older I totally get it.  

By afternoon when we began to catch a glimpse of the mountains, our excitement escalated to the point of no return.  None of us could sleep or read because we were too focused on determining which mountain would contain the Y, our beacon of hope.

It was a small but glorious reunion: an aunt, uncle, a boy cousin and a girl cousin.  But they were the only family my mom had in all of America.  These were our people, and we were free from everyday life at daycare for an entire week.  One of the parts we loved most was Sparky.  We couldn’t have pets in our apartment, and so a week with a dog was novel and intoxicatingly amusing.

Our entertainment for the week trumped even Christmas, starting with dinner at Heaps o’ Pizza (aka Brick Oven south of the BYU campus) that first Saturday night.  Such a glorious kickoff, pizza and apple beer in a restaurant booth with everyone.  I was as content as Templeton at the fair.

Until Sunday.  I hated going to church as a visitor.  No one ever knew where La Mesa was, so we eventually learned to tell them all we were from San Diego even though it didn’t feel as precise.  A hardship for sure, I feel my own children’s pains when they balk at attending youth classes with strangers.

Over the years the details changed only slightly.  Our uncle worked at BYU so we would go visit him on campus in his upper-floor, windowed office. He seemed so important; his work so tidy.  Although I dreamed of a day, I couldn’t reach far enough down the road of my imagination to conceptualize attending this university as a student.  How interesting it was for me to walk those same halls as young student, grown up enough apparently to visit my uncle on my own.

As much as we adored our uncle, the main reason for visiting campus was the book store, as it is even today when we visit Utah.  Far more than a literary warehouse, it is three floors of nearly everything you can think of from art, bumper stickers, and jewelry to arguably the world’s best fudge, extensive candy counter, and collection of collegiate wearables. A new sweatshirt was a given, the souvenir of choice.  They were expensive, as they are still today; but it was a non-negotiable.  One year our middle sister insisted on a letterman’s jacket, cajoling mom into buying it for her, insisting she would just wear it with jeans and a white t-shirt—our go-to foundational pieces whenever asked what we would wear with whatever item we were trying to get mom to buy us. It had a cougar on it.

The rest of the week’s activities rivaled the thrill of our day on campus.  We spent hours at a waterslide park that had just three blue slides: the minnow, the octopus, and the barracuda.  Mom and her sister would sit and tan, talking and talking and talking.  It was the same as we got older and ventured to Salt Lake to go to Raging Waters in an old borrowed green Baptist van that smelled a little off.  They had no idea where we were during any part of the day because that's just the way things were back then.  We’d go to the Young Ambassador shows and the mall, bowling in the basement of the student center at BYU and to the Stadium of Fire for the 4th of July show.  I remember holding a sparkler for the first time during one of these trips and noting the brave cousins and friends who would watch the fireworks from the roof.

One year my dad insisted on taking us to the family farm in Preston, Idaho.  I think my mom felt resentment about having to leave her sister for an entire day (it was a four-hour drive each way—that’s when the speed limit was much slower), but it was a family reunion and we needed to be there.  So many old people, so many relatives I had no idea about.  It was not my scene.  But I rode a horse.  And my grandparents and other cousins were there.  And it was sort of neat to see where my dad used to spend time as a kid and to hear about bats in their attic bedroom.  Small and quaint.  I know I would appreciate its charm if I could go back today.

We tried camping one year.  But neither of our families knew how to camp.  My aunt and uncle borrowed two pop-up campers that no one really knew how to set up, and the moms made mountains of food that we eventually just tossed.   We drank some bad water at a mountain reception and had diarrhea and violent stomach aches the entire time we were in Zion and Bryce.  So so sad.  Beautiful country, and we all but missed it.  But it makes for a marvelous memory.

So basically we'd just go swimming and shopping most of the week, picking up candy, cassette tapes and freckles (and sometimes blisters) along the way.  Just a glorious way to spend a portion of summer.  And so hard to return to regular life the next.  But as our vacation came to a close, we were satisfied.  Dad needed to get back to his upholstery work, and mom had to get back to the bank.  We had lived large and had soaked in all the memories we could hold for one year.

For some reason, I've reserved a place in my mind for those pleasant, sleepy mornings as our parents loaded up the van or station wagon with our suitcases and pillows.  All we’d have to do was hug the grown-ups goodbye, assume our positions in the vehicle and return to sleep, a blissful escape from the permanence of leaving the week behind. A sinking, hollow feeling hung in the air. But like the morning I awoke to just last week, the early canyon breezes felt refreshing, piercing the already warming dawn as the neighborhood still slumbered.  It felt like we were up before the day even yawned, as if we were trying to sneak away before we could change our minds and stay just one more day.  For an entire year, we would miss our family—and having a dog.  Our parents seemed happier, lighter, more relaxed; and we laughed a bit more than usual during this week away. And maybe these trips were part of the glue that kept our family together the rest of the year.  These were unforgettable times, and as simple as they were, they are etched in my heart forever.  Which is why I can still feel Utah in my Montana summer mornings.




*Thank you to Cheryl for helping me remember so far back into our lives as kids.