I'm utterly exhausted, every available bone in my whole entire body aches, and I'm completely brain dead, which is all understandable because I just got back from a vacation.Vacations are great things. I look forward to them with genuine child-like glee, but I have begun to realize that a person needs to take some time off to recover from so much fun.
When the household widgets were small, Aylworth family vacations took on near-mythic proportions. Even now, when my adult-size children gather around the family dinner table for some sort of an occasion or
celebration, the long-ago trips are often a topic of conversation, and those vacations have developed shorthand nicknames.
"Hey remember the taxi crash trip?"
"What about the camping vacation when we spent most of our time in the emergency room?"
"How about the vacation when we all got a ride in the highway patrol car?" Don't ask.
"Remember the time the van kept breaking down?"To that question there is only one answer, "Which time?"
There was the vacation when Matthew had an emergency appendectomy. There was the trip when we stayed in the place with two stuffed alligators in the lobby.
There was the time we stuffed the entire family into an alleged motel room that wouldn't have made a good-sized walk-in closet, and ended up paying an arm and a leg for the privilege because Yellowstone National Park was full and this was our only option.
Our vacations all tended to be made on a shoestring budget, and usually driving vehicles that sane people wouldn't have trusted to make it across the street.
Because of financial and time constraints, the trips were limited. Often the journeys became trials by ordeal, where we tried to cram more miles, more sights, and more "we are going to have fun on this trip or die in the attempt" than anybody not living in a sit-com would even consider. Also driving times, or at least the time to start a trip, was dictated by the functioning of the car's air conditioner, which was usually non-functional. If we were headed somewhere that was hot, or going through someplace that was hot to reach our destination, then night driving became a necessity.
While the family made numerous trips that required we traverse Nevada in the summer, none of my kids ever saw Nevada until they were in their late teens, because they always made the journey snoozing as we
cruised along in the darkness.Other times we planned our routes not by the quickest or the most scenic option, but based on the way that had the most population in case we broke down.
We learned how to make sandwiches for nine as we rumbled down the road because a Big Mac would have been the budgetary last straw.
Even with the budget considerations, we made a couple of amazing trips. The whole family recalls both trips we made deep into Mexico. Once with all seven of our own wee beasties in tow, and a nephew we added to the crew just for jollies, we found ourselves in a tiny fishing village on the jungle coast of western Mexico.
My dear bride, the saintly Susan, and I had temporarily left the brood to the care of the older brothers in the hotel room and strolled in the tropical sunset down to the town square for a few minutes of relative peace.
We were sitting in the raised square when a fellow American came up to us. He said he had seen Susan and me, with the widgets, in a local restaurant earlier in the evening.
"I'm a freelance photographer," he said, and explained he had covered wars, revolutions, and natural disasters all over Central and South America.
"I've got to tell you, you are the bravest people I have ever met," he said. I had thought the kids were on their best behavior in the restaurant, but I thanked him and he walked off shaking his head.
Since the early days of family vacations, our budgets and our vehicles have improved. In recent years our trips have been marked more with successful travel than tales of disaster.
I still find I need a few days after a vacation to recover from all that much fun and frivolity, and get back into the swing of being a taciturn newspaper reporter, but now it is more a response to over-aggressive recreation than overt battle wounds.
At some level I think I like the more successful trips we make these days, but I have to admit the old trips made for better after-vacation stories.