Introduction
When I was growing up my parents took my three siblings and me on a yearly summer vacation to visit our extended family. We alternated between seeing my father’s family in Minnesota, my mother’s family in Vermont, and my grandmother who lived in Florida. Although none of the places that we visited was tourist attractions, it was the feeling of going on an adventure that I really enjoyed. Our trips were the highlight of my childhood and, once I started a family of my own, I knew that I wanted to give my children this same sense of adventure. The difference between my parents and me is that they went on their vacations out of a sense of filial duty. Today, since my whole family lives nearby, I knew that I could take the kids anywhere that I wanted. The only reason to go on a trip, then, was to make some memories. Our vacations have helped to bind us together through shared experiences. I know that this is a cliché but, just because it is a cliché, that doesn’t make it any less true. All of the trips have been the effort worth it because they allowed us to spend some quality time together. In addition, they became a way for me to reward myself for grinding my way through another year of work. For me, there is no better way to pat myself on the back than to spend time with my family.
The fun for me is the challenge of laying out a good vacation. It provides me with a brief respite from my work life. The planning, and the trip itself, get me out of my rut for a while by exploring what other cities, and countries, have to offer. The key is to get an anchor event for every place that we are going to visit. Once I have the event, then I start working on the hotels and all of the other logistics that go into a well laid out vacation. My personal preference is to visit new cities to see the best that they have to offer, whether it is a museum, or a major attraction that the place is proud of. When the kids were small I could do whatever I wanted as long as I incorporated some fun side trips, like going to an amusement park; but as they got older I had to bend and do what they wanted to do, like going to the beach or build in an afternoon for shopping. Compromise has become a big part of our time together.
When we first started taking our family trips, I was very concerned about money, so we took many car trips because they were relatively cheap. I prefer driving to any other mode of transportation because I feel at peace while in the car. While driving on an extended road trip, I am forced to slow down. I know that no matter what I do I won’t be able to get to my destination quickly, so I settle in for a long ride and allow my mind to wander. The constant drone of the car propelling itself down the road blocks out all distractions, and the vibrations that my vehicle emits have a calming effect. To ensure that I am comfortable on a long ride I sit on a soft pillow, and then stuff a second pillow at the small of my back, next to my lumbar, to avoid back pain. In effect, I become locked into position into my seat, just like the drivers at the Indianapolis 500. Yet, I feel free. I like to drive through the night because when it is dark out, and there is little traffic on the road, I can I work myself into a trance. Before I know it, the hours have flown by and through concentrated thought; I have exhausted myself mentally and physically. Finally, at the end of a long road trip, I park the car, and unbundle myself from my seat. My whole body creaks and groan as I stretch while I get used to standing on my legs again, but I feel completely satisfied.
For me, the destination isn’t as important as having the whole family do the trip together; there is no ultimate Mecca that I feel like I have to visit and that gives me a lot of freedom to mix up the type of trip that our family takes. We can go to Europe, or not. There is no place where I have a burning desire to visit and, when we first started out, the only rule was that our destination had to be within a ten-hour drive. Over time, when money became less of a concern, we started to take cruises. New Orleans is only a twelve-hour drive so we took many ships out of that city and, when we had exhausted all of the destinations out of New Orleans, we started to fly to other ports.
Even when the trip doesn’t go well, I would argue that the vacation was still worth it because we had a shared experience. For example, when we drove from Cape Canaveral back to Louisville, it took us about eighteen hours in the car. We sat in a traffic jam in Atlanta for three hours in the middle of the hot August sun. By the end of the drive, I was carsick. For the first and only time, I had to turn the driving over to my son because I literally couldn’t sit up straight. I was exhausted, hot, and dehydrated. Yet, even this drive I don’t regret because we all suffered through it together and we still laugh about it to this day. On the other hand, I didn’t repeat the mistake of driving through the afternoon sun in a southern city during the summer months.
One final reason to travel is because it makes my family appreciate what we have. After seeing the poverty of Belize City and Mazatlán, for example, and observing how the unfortunate live, we are better able to suffer through our relatively small inconveniences of congested traffic and long checkout lines. We didn’t expect to see the poor people; that experience was just a residual of a long bus trip, but it is something that will always stay with us. Often the true adventure is experiencing something that we never expect to have seen or done.
I have divided this book into sections, depending on what type of vacation we took. The comic cons, for example, are a totally different type of vacation so they deserve a separate category. Other than the trips are organized to descending order; the most recent trip are mentioned first in each category and the trips that took place years ago are last in each category. If we went to the same place twice then I combined them into one entry. After putting in literally hundreds of hours to write this book, my only hope is that you will enjoy it.Forward on Cruising
I like the big cruise ships because I am a gym rat. The bigger the ship, the better the gym, and since I go to the gym twice a day, the facilities mean a lot to me. First thing in the morning, I get up, grab a cup of coffee, and wait outside the gym door until the manger opens it. Sadly, I am not alone, and several of us muscle heads stretch and loosen up until the door opens. While the others make a beeline to the treadmills, I go the weight room because so few people are there at that hour. A stretch and abs class is offered at 7:00 so I do resistance training for an hour and then join the class. After weights and the stretching class, I take a run to rid myself of any energy that I might have left. This is my favorite part of the whole day because I like to run around the upper deck while watching the sun come up. The growing daylight, reaching through the clouds, looks like a painting by Monet, Gaugin, or Cezanne. I give myself permission to be myself; to not feel guilty about going to bed so early so that I can get up and run in the morning.
After an intense workout, I can relax, and I meet my wife back at the room. This leads me to my second favorite hobby on the cruise and that is eating. I love to try new types of food, like frog legs and escargot, because if I don’t like it then I can pick up something else. Experiencing new foods is low risk on a cruise ship because if you don’t like what you ordered then the waiter brings you something else. Everything is all-inclusive on the ship so I can try several entrees in one meal if I want. Also, I like the meals because it is then that we have our family time. Everyone gets together at breakfast and dinner to talk about excursions and whatever happened that day. Everyone is in a good mood because the excitement from the day hasn’t worn off yet and because we are hungry and know that we are about to be fed. Even the fussiest eaters of my family cannot complain because there is such a variety of foods at the buffet.
My wife, Tracey, is blind. The reason why she likes cruising so much is that the ships give her complete freedom. All of the rooms and the elevators have been labelled in Braille and those signs at least point her in the right direction. When we first get on the ship, Tracey maps out where our room is in proximity the restaurant, casino, and stairwells. She can find her own way around in that confined space. If she wants to go to the far end of the ship, to lay out on the serenity deck for example, then she will need some guidance. Aside from that, as long as she stays in the same general area, she has complete independence. Her confidence in her ability to navigate the ship has grown with every cruise that we have taken and I am proud of her.The nice thing about a cruise is that they offer a little bit for everyone. For example, Grant likes the comedy shows and the trivia games. Lillian hates the sun because she burns so easily, but she likes Karaoke and dancing, so she has something to do. Virginia has never met a person whom she couldn’t turn into a friend, so when she is not with the rest of the family, then she is palling around with some new acquaintances. Everyone is happy while on the ship and we all have grown to enjoy leisurely dinners together when we can share the new and interesting experiences of our day.
My son in law, Tanner, even came with us for one cruise. The purpose of the trip was to spend some time together, so I only ordered two rooms on the cruise ship and there were three people in each cabin. I was expecting for the third person in our small room to get a bunk bed but instead there was a pull out sofa for the third bed and it blocked the door every time we opened it up. The result was that when I left the cabin early in the morning I had to climb over Tanner. It was like a comedy sketch from Saturday Night Live, because any time we moved around the cabin we were tripping over each other. When I remarked that Tanner had been a good Joe about it, Lillian responded with, “Well Virginia has not been a good Joe about it” because she complained whenever someone climbed over her bed.
Part of the fun of cruising is sharing a table with complete strangers for our meals. We have met an array of people, including a know-it-all, a Debbie Downer, and a guy who looked like a rap star with his over-sized glasses and his clown watch. When the matre d' put us with the rapper and his entourage, I would have thought that there would be no interaction between us since we are so different. Yet the rapper turned out to be a nice person and we chatted amicably. As we were talking, I silently chastised myself for prejudging people by the way that they look. It was a lesson that I had to learn again two days later when I saw a twenty-something girl in the lobby who was poorly dressed and sported several tattoos. "White trash," I thought to myself. However, when we sat down at the same breakfast table, I learned that the girl had been in college for nine years to get her PhD in psychology. The cruise was her last opportunity to spend some time with her parents before she moved to Alaska to complete the doctorate program. Fortunately, I kept my observations to myself, once again, I realized that traveling breaks down prejudices, especially when you are forced to spend time with people who are different from you, and I am still learning not to judge people by their appearances.
No matter where we go, there are no shortages of characters on a cruise ship. Meghan, who was working on her PhD in math, and Justin, her husband who, upon meeting me, said, “I feel the need to make him proud of me!” I was a lot older than Justin and I think that I was a father figure to him. Then there was Roscoe, the writer and reenactor, who liked to practice magic in his spare time. Roscoe hailed from Wichita and was on the cruise to see the grave of the famous outlaw named Soapy Smith, who was buried in Skagway. Cathy was an older kindergarten teacher who bought the unlimited drink and bingo package. She got her money’s worth because she was drunk for the whole cruise and spent most of her time at the bingo parlor. Finally, Tod and his wife were a religious couple and they were paid by their church to take two mentally handicapped adults on the cruise.
The more earthy passengers enjoy going to the pool parties, but it is not my thing. To fill in some of the down time on the ship, the cruise director held games like Pool Olympics, Majority Rules, and The Perfect Couple. The competition that stuck with me the most was the “Mr. Sky” contest. Volunteers were called up on stage and encouraged to perform sexually suggestive dances. The participants included a man with Downs Syndrome, a Dad with a huge paunch, and a couple of truly buff guys. Watching this parade of dancers in the front row were three little girls, a couple of mothers, and a grandmother who used a walker to get to her seat. I thought that the parents of the three little girls would have a lot of explaining to do some day and, probably, the little girls would not thank their parents for taking them to a strip show. Even I had to spend some mental energy trying to erase the images of the dancers from my memory.The pool parties and getting seasick are two of the things that I don’t like about the cruises. Also, just getting to port can be a pain. On our last trip to New Orleans we had to ordeal of driving through a monsoon to get to the parking garage. The last time that we flew, our departing flight was an hour late because they took so long to load our luggage onto the plane. We missed our connecting flight but the airline was good enough to give us a voucher for a hotel room and a food voucher as well. When we finally got a flight out, our plane ran into some turbulence, but it was the flight attendant, and not the passengers, who panicked. With fear in her voice, she ordered everyone back to his or her seats and to buckle themselves in. If we weren’t concerned before, we certainly were now worried. We landed safely but these incidences lend themselves to the fact that it is the journey to our destination, which can put a damper on a trip, but rarely does the cruise itself disappoint.
Thanks,
Jeff
Jeff
No comments:
Post a Comment