In 22 days, I will be on the beach enjoying a frosty adult beverage while my children play at my feat, making sandcastles and memories at the same time. However, in 21 days, I will still be in hell, driving the second day of a 10 hour long journey to Oak Island, NC.
Vacations are a part of my family tradition, like noxema on sunburns and corn niblits in butter sauce at every holiday meal. One of my earliest memories is of swimming in a kidney shaped pool at a hotel and being confused why anyone would shape a pool like a kidney. My brother and I jumped into that pool endlessly, while my dad would stand some appropriately scary distance away from the edge and then give us a push back to the side of the pool. I learned to dive in that pool, taught by my dad to put my hands on my head like a shark.
When I explain where we're going on vacation, people often say that we're crazy for driving so far, or that we're brave for going so far, or that they would love to go there, but it's too far to drive. When I was a kid, we would drive 625 miles from Pittsburgh, PA to Myrtle Beach, SC just about every year, until we found Oak Island in 1986. We would always take two days to get there, stopping overnight somewhere a bit more than halfway.
Vacation doesn't start with the drive though, it starts with a list. Or several lists. It moves from list to pre-packing, when my mother would begin to lay seemingly random items on the dining room table. A shirt. A book. A bottle of wine. Soon a pattern would emerge and in the last week before we left, the table was covered, the floor had stuff on it, and you couldn't wear anything you might want to take to the beach cause if it wasn't on the table, it wasn't getting packed.
The last evening before we left, the anticipation would be intense. My brother and I were sent to bed early with admonitions to go to sleep quickly cause we were getting up early in the morning. I don't know what time my mom would wake us, but I do know that it was always dark. We'd pile into the car, and I'd try to go back to sleep with my head on my pillow resting on the back window. Sometime around dawn, my parents would find us a restaurant to eat breakfast. My brother did not eat breakfast food as a kid. He always wanted a hamburger, which was hard to rustle up at 7AM. Now that I'm a parent, I have a whole new perspective on what my brother and I put my parents through. So he'd ask for a hamburger, the waitress would check, then tell us no they can't make him one, and then Mike would be grumpy. Being the near perfect child I was, I happily ate my Frosted Flakes, out of the little perforated box of course.
Back in the car with my cranky brother, the games would begin. I think you should be able to get a dividing line painted down the middle of your back seat as an option in sedans. I know that one year, we did this drive in an unairconditioned, black Camaro with leather seats, but I don't really remember it. I think I've blocked it out because the pain caused by peeling my poor young thighs off of those seats was simply too excrutiating to remember. I do vividly remember the sea foam green interior of my dad's company car, a Chevy Impala. I remember how the velour upholstery got warmed by my body heat and would never get cool. I remember how velour, though soft to the touch at first, would eventually start to hurt after sitting on it too long. I remember that Mike would draw a line in the seat by running his finger down the seat, creating a dark green line in the upholstery and then dare me to cross said line. And of course, being a younger sister, I crossed it many times.
It was the 80s, so there were no pesky car seats to tie us down. I would take the shoulder strap of the seat belt and put it behind me and then curl up in a ball on the seat to sleep, with the lap belt running from my mid chest, over my hip and behind me. Another favorite position was upside down, head on the cooler that always ended up on my side of the car, behind my dad, cause I was short. I used to look longingly at conversion vans as we drove by, thinking that those people knew how to travel.
My mom is a master of making up games. We did all the standbys... "A my name is", "In my grandma's attic I found", car bingo, license plate bingo. Over the years, other games were added. We would bring the Trivial Pursuit cards and ask each other questions. We made up a game that involved hitting the room of the car every time you saw a car with a cargo carrier and shouting "Snail!" One year, my parents rustled up a tiny black and white television with an antenna and we managed to watch snow interrupted occasionally by television programs. When we were young, there was the CB radio to keep us amused. I actually miss CBs. It's like cell phones on a party line with it's own language... breaker 1-9... what's your 20? My dad's handle was "Lieutenant" and I loved to hear my grandpa, "The Judge", call over the radio to warn him of a smokey at mile marker 129 northbound. I had no idea what it all meant, but it sounded fantastic. We made truck drivers honk their horns for us by madly pumping our arms up and down and waved at people in other cars to get them to wave back. And the scavenger hunts... oh man, that's a whole other blog's worth of entertainment!
Becuase we'd left so early, we'd always get to the hotel fairly early and we'd have the whole evening to hang out. The overnight in the hotel was always a favorite part of vacation. I mean, no where else could you walk down a hall in your PJs and get ice in a little tiny brown bucket. To this day, I love the sound of the ice machine in hotels. It's the sound of summer vacation starting. There was always a pool and that is where my story started, in the pool on the way to summer vacation.
Jeff's first year going to the beach, I prepared as my mother taught me... I made lists and began to put stuff out in a one layer think spread across the guest bed. Jeff, in his effort to be the man with the most, packed it all on Tuesday night. I spent Wednesday in a panic. I couldn't see what was in the bags, and I hadn't checked off my list. Thursday, I unpacked and repacked everything so I could check off my list. We got up and drove to Emporia, VA and spent the night at a really crappy Red Carpet Inn. It didn't have a pool, but it did have an ice machine. Now Jeff knows that the lists and the stress and the drawn out car ride are all part of vacation and he just goes with it. Cause the getting there starts in January, when we book the place to stay, continues through the year when Mom and I write the scavenger hunt, and is ending when we are getting into the car, and it's definitely half the fun!
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