Vacation... the best of times...

Our family vacation is coming up. So slowly... I keep thinking it's closer than it is, and I count the weeks to make sure and I'm usually a week off. If only time would go faster... It has set me to thinking about the family vacations we went on as a child. (I warned my mother that I would post this. It's just too good to keep to myself.) The most memorable vacation was the one that we took to Maine. It was mom, dad, my brother and me. Our youngest (at the time) sister had to stay with Grandma Lichtenberger. Because she was too little to really enjoy the trip, mom said. Jess and I knew better. It was because she screamed too much. (Sorry, Deb. You did, though) The whole vacation was off to a rough start because someone, I don't remember who, but I think Dad does, locked the keys in the car. The spare was in the house, but the house was already locked, and you guessed it, the house key was in the car. So, by some stroke of genius, because in those days, you left the house locked and the keys hanging in the truck's ignition, dad jumped into the truck and headed to his brother's place to pick up the extra house key. Dad got back, we got in the car and headed off on our vacation in a terrible silence. Our first night, we spent at Pennsylvania Grand Canyon. We did some hiking, and showered, and slept in a tent. Dad usually was the breakfast cook when we went camping. It seemed the only thing he knew how to cook on was a little gas camp stove. He made some good Bisquick pancakes. Ok, so Mom stirred them up and he cooked 'em. They were still good! Part of the trip happened in the rain. I don't remember what state park it was, or even what state we were in, but we had to camp in the tent in the rain that night. Dad stomped around in the woods trying to find some dry wood while a truck drove slowly past the campsite and a man yelled, "Firewood for sale!" I tried to tell Dad that the man had dry firewood for sale, but mom sent me into the tent quickly. Not before I heard Dad mutter something about paying an arm and a leg for firewood. The fire was pretty smoky that night, so any mosquitoes that might have braved the rain were done in by the smoke.  The next stop that I remember was Niagara Falls. It was there I had my first terrifying experience with a wax museum. (The second was in Gettysburg, but that's a story for another time.) As we entered the museum, the whole thing felt quite spooky, and in my timid little 6/7 year old brain, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, so I was flat out nervous already. As we turned each corner into a new room, I felt braver and braver, but still let my younger brother go first, you know, just in case... We turned into a room with a man standing in the corner, talking. I knew the man wasn't real, having already seen this type of scene earlier in the tour. What I was not prepared for however, was the man asleep in the bed. (To this day I have no idea why they had a man asleep in the bed, but they did.) I didn't even realize there was someone in the bed, still suspiciously checking out the guy in the corner to see if his lips were really moving, when I heard a snore and saw the quilt on the bed move like someone was about to get up. Jesse was still ahead of me, and it was at this point that he decided leading the tour was not his cup of tea, and said as he pushed past me, "We gotta get outta here." Mom and Dad were behind us just coming into the room, and they thought the whole deal was hilarious, and I was sure they were going to wake up the guy in the bed with their noise. Needless to say, we couldn't go out the way we came in, so we spent the rest of the tour peeking out at the exhibits from behind our parents. I'm still to this day, not convinced the guy in the bed was wax. He sounded entirely too real...  That night was a rainy, stormy night, and there wasn't a whole lot to do. We sat at a little camp store that was running videos of people going over the falls in barrels. I was entranced by this, no.1 because I wasn't allowed to watch TV, and this was something new to me! And then, the idea that someone would go over the Niagara Falls gave me something to think about! That night, a bad storm hit, and we went to sleep in a tiny little cabin that had a bunk bed and that was about it. I still don't know where the restrooms might have been, but I dreamed that night that I was going over the falls in the barrel, and when I awoke, completely terrified in the dark, (and probably still traumatized from the wax museum) I could still hear the water hitting the outside of my barrel, (rain on a tin roof sounds like that) I sat straight up and tried to get out of bed, forgetting that I was on the top bunk. My head hit the rafter overhead and I saw stars. I started to cry, because I had to go to the bathroom and I couldn't remember ever getting into a barrel! This woke my parents up, and much to my mother's chagrin, I was adamant about not going back to bed until I had gone to the bathroom. It was still raining and we could still hear thunder, so my mother, one of the most innovative people I know (she gets that from her mother) pulled a Campbell's soup can out of the trash, and with the aid of a flashlight, helped me take care of business. I went back to bed, and slept the rest of the night. We woke to a sunny day, the storms of the night and the rude awakening, but a distant memory. It still remains one of my favorite vacation stories. We camped in a campground by the ocean in Maine at some point. Supposedly we could see the ocean from the campsite, but a thick fog moved in and obscured the view. We were told if we listened, we could hear the ocean. I don't remember hearing it that night, although the ocean waves have become one of my favorite sounds. We did get to see the ocean from the boardwalk during that vacation. We were not allowed to go down to the sand, as my mother was sure the ocean would reach up onto the sand and sweep us away forever. There were a number of times when we were teenagers, that mom probably wondered why she hadn't let us go down to the ocean! I don't remember the whole trip, just bits and pieces and I am not even sure I got events in the proper order. It was the most fun I had ever had in my young life and gave me some memories to last a lifetime. Mom and Dad always told us they were spending our inheritance with us when they took us on trips. I, for one, am so glad they did.  We didn't go great distances all the time, but they are the reason I love camping, road trips, and the mountains. The memories they gave us, I will cherish forever, and it has made me want to give my own children the same type of experiences. So, come June we'll be loading up the minivan and heading out onto the road for a trip to Florida to visit family. We are already questioning our own sanity for thinking about spending 22 hours in a car with 3 children, but I know they will remember these times the way I remember the trips of my childhood. And someday one of them may even write a blog about it... It will probably start like this; It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...