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Sanity takes a family holiday
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Now that I have a family of my own, I have a whole new appreciation for my childhood vacations.

Of course, the way my mother tells it, we never cried once in any plane, we never had a tantrum in any public place (or privately for that matter), and we never once spoke back.

She never had to pack a backpack full of things to entertain us - the DVD's, the puzzles, the colouring books. She tells me this as I madly pack up Dollar Store gimmicks for a recent trip to Costa Rica. Apparently, my brother and I just sat quietly in our seats every time the airplane made its way across the Atlantic... unless we were sleeping peacefully from things called sky-cots - hammocks above the seats.

Hmmmmm, a little hard to believe? She swears it's true.

Oh, if she could only be a fly on the wall to watch my husband and I cart a two and a half year old and a six month old on planes, ferries and van shuttles for a three-week vacation in Costa Rica this year.

Even with children as wonderful as ours, it takes a bold kind of parent that will forgo trips to the Caribbean Islands to laze around the beach and instead take their kids around every castle ever built on the British Isles. I've been in them all.

When I was about 10 we ventured off the Isles and onto the Continent, driving my dad's gold Rover from Glasgow to Marbella in the Costa del Sol in Spain.

Spain - land of sun, sandy shores and topless beaches.

Good-bye ancient castles with your turrets and moats and dank rock walls! Hello ancient Catholic churches, the oldest bullring in the country, the caves of Gibraltar and the shopping for Lladro figurines.

And we never, not once, had a tantrum?

So, it was a special kind of treat for my brother and I when my parents announced that we were going to a water park for the day.

We took out our swimsuits, our beach towels and our flip flops with uncontained glee and dutifully sat still and quiet as mum lashed on the sunscreen. This may have been more than 25 years ago but even back then there was some kind of an understanding of the power of the sun... especially the Spanish sun. Far, far, far different from the Scottish sun, which is where we spent the majority of our summers trying to eke out a tan.

Despite "summering" in Scotland and England every year, I had always managed to burn my nose.

Freckles and pale skin do not a sun worshipper make and my poor nose bore the brunt of my British blood.

With special attention paid to my nose, a double dose of Coppertone, we were unleashed at the water park.

Picture a couple of kids used to touring churches and museums. Here we were with long speedy water tubes snaking in every direction. We thought we had died and gone to heaven.

What a day!

It wasn't until the end of the day, and the sun was going down, that the problems began.

With my poker straight brown bangs covering my forehead, my mum missed that part in the daily sunscreen regimen. The thing was, as soon as I hurtled down that first slide and splashed in the pool beneath, my hair slicked back and my poor, lily-white forehead was fully exposed to the wrath of the sun.

It beat down relentlessly the whole day, unleashing its powerful rays on my unsuspecting skin until my baby-skinned forehead was a crisp, deep pink leather.

The sweats and chills soon followed and I may have even vomited as the sunstroke worked its wrath through my body.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Not by far.

The next day I awoke to find a water blister stretching from one temple to the other, puffing out behind my bangs.

I was like a creature from another world. And here I was in the land of the beautiful folk with their golden brown skin, kissed by the sun, rather than crisped by it.

As these things do, the crisis eventually passed.

The blister popped, and I returned to normal with a lesson learned.

That's not to say I haven't been burned since but I took special care with the foreheads while we were in Costa Rica in January.

Sure, there may have been meltdowns and a few tantrums along the way but there were no major sunburns.

 

 

By Andrew Mitchell

Back in the day, like the 1970s, early '80s, you didn't fly much. I was on one flight when I was two years old and then another when I was 12. Through high school I flew to maybe two different destinations.

There's been a lot of change since those days. When I was a kid planes had smoking sections and in-flight meal service. Nobody asked you to take off your shoes or, if you packed your own bag. My mom made my brother and I dress up in our best clothes, which seemed kind of stupid to us but sure enough all the men on the plane wore suits and ties, while women wore dresses and high heels.

Because we didn't fly much for holidays, most of our family holiday travelling was done by station wagon with the occasional train thrown in. On a two-week vacation we'd spend four days in the car at minimum, without a whole lot to do except wait for the next service station to stretch our legs.

I don't have very good memories of being on the road. As the younger brother, I had to sit out of punching distance of my older brother at all times. I'd get bored and start something, or he'd get bored and start something, and then our parents would have to intervene. They threatened to leave us behind at every pit stop and actually made us get out of the car a few times. We behaved for a while after that, but we knew they were bluffing.

My older brother also had a tendency to get carsick so there was always a big green bowl in the backseat. I wasn't allowed to read Archie and Richie Rich comics if he didn't feel well because just the sight of me doing it used to set him off.

The car had no tape deck, so it was radio or nothing - and it was usually nothing, with long stretches of road in between populated areas. There was no air conditioning, so it was always hot. My dad was a smoker, so it always stunk.

There were no seatbelts that you could get to without digging between seat cushions and mounds of sticky popcorn crumbs.

I could lay down in the back of our station wagon if I wanted to try and sleep, or escape back there if more separation was required between me and my brother.

These days, a road trip is a whole different story.

Moving about the Vehicle

Then: No car seats or seatbelts meant you could curl up somewhere and nap, stick your head out the window for fresh air, or stick your butt out the window to annoy truckers. Babies could sleep in actual car beds.

Now: Kids under the age of nine or 145 cm have to use a booster seat and belts are mandatory at all times. There's no lying down, not much leaning forward and a $109 fine if you don't buckle up. It's good training for our sedentary, desk-chair-all-day, couch-all-night lifestyles.

Advantage: Then. It wasn't safe, but the cars were built like tanks (with the exception of the Pinto) and the speed limit was lower. On a 20-hour trip a nap was essential - you can only trade punches with your brother for so long before even that gets boring.

Music

Then: No electronics. You had AM radio and maybe FM. You might have a tape deck, but most people didn't - they were too expensive. In between major cities there wasn't much to listen to on the airwaves other than religious broadcasts, Children of the Corn-style. Reception was dodgy and required a lot of fine-tuning with the knob.

Now:  You can listen to 20,000 songs on your iPod. Satellite radio, if you pay $15 a month, gives you a wide range of choice without any blackout zones. The car stereo is usually for the driver only - your kids will be in the backseat with headphones on anyway, listening to their own choice of music.

Advantage: Now. Try driving a long distance in a vehicle with nothing on but the radio. I dare you.

In-car Entertainment

Then: I could read if my brother wasn't feeling carsick, but if he was then all I could really do was stare out the window. That might seem great, but the view from expressways and Interstates is never all that spectacular. I'd play with Lego or G.I. Joes, or find a bug splat on the front windshield and pretend it was the sight for my missile launcher. Sometimes I'd pretend I was running or biking or skateboarding or skiing beside the car. Fighting was a good way to break up the monotony.

Now: My daughter has had an iPod to watch movies and play games on since she was two years old, and most station wagons and minivans come with an option for in-car screens and DVD players. If we ever get a computer tablet it's going to be because of a long road trip.

Cell phones and other devices with 3G/4G wireless also ensure you're never far from the Internet, email, etc.

And how many roadtrips have been saved by handheld gaming, like the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP or a phone with some games on it?

Even watching your progress on a GPS is more entertaining than anything we had in the old days.

Advantage: Now. Quite frankly, I'm amazed we survived.

Comfort

Then: No air conditioning. It was available on luxury models, but using it burned through your gas twice as quickly and it could cause your car engine to overheat. Winter heating was not great, especially if you had a hole in your floor.

But the seats were plush and soft, and the back seat was usually like a big sofa. No seatbelts meant you could stretch out. Every car needed a V8 to haul around that much luxury. Some station wagons had a fold-out rear-facing seat in the back so you could make faces at the drivers behind you, well out of reach of your parents.

Now: Air conditioning and climate control are more or less standard on any vehicle. My Luddite mom actually had to specially a request a vehicle without it, and no doubt she got some funny looks from that salesman. New cars also have power windows, power locks, power seats, tinted windows to block the sun and functioning vehicle suspension to absorb bumps on the road. But the seats are lightweight and uncomfortable in most vehicles with four and six-cylinder engines, and the fact you have to wear a belt at all times makes it hard to get comfortable or sleep.

Advantage: Then. I rarely use air conditioning, but you can't put a price on comfortable seats.

Navigation

Then: "We're not lost, I saw a sign back there." "Dammit, I know where we are!" "No, I'm not stopping to ask someone, I know where we're going." "Uh oh, bad neighbourhood... kids, roll your windows up. Just do it! Quickly now!" "What do you mean 'we're out of gas?'"?

Now: Just plug the address in our GPS and a friendly voice (or Yoda, if you have that option) will guide you to your destination, or the nearest hotel or gas station. Usually. "Recaculating... recalculating.... drive 100 metres, then turn ri-... recalculating... recalculating...turn left in 200 metres... turn left next exit... recalculating...recalculating."

Advantage: Now. GPS devices aren't perfect, but when they're right they're a beautiful thing.

Food

Road food is pretty much the same, with the recent addition of Subway.

Then: No drink holders.

Now: Drink holders.

Advantage: It depends how you feel about Subway.

Air Travel

Then: Spend a small fortune to get a seat in economy, which was behind first class, business class and second class sections, each section divided by a little curtain. Dress up, and show up whenever - if you're in danger of being late they will clear a path for you through security. The smoke did not stay in the smoking section. Entertainment was a movie running on a single television that you might not be able to see. Kids got to visit the cockpit and meet the captain. If you were going far enough, everybody got a kit with slippers, eye mask, travel toothbrush, grooming kit with scissors and nail files, a razor and shaving kit, etc. If you were a kid you'd get a scale model of the plane. Free food. Free drinks, including alcohol. Stewardesses were former models and seemed to like people. Planes flew even if they were empty, so you could stretch out to your heart's desire.

Now: Spend nothing to get a seat on the same plane as everyone else, jam-packed into seats that are so small that even a moderately overweight person like director Kevin Smith has had to purchase a second ticket. People wear the same clothes they did the day before, scrambling to get to the airport three hours before their flight so they have time to go through security. The airlines charge you $5 for sandwiches so everybody brings their own questionable food. You get a few cups of fluid from take-off to landing, just enough to keep you alive. There's no smoking, but there are no rules about perfume/aftershave/B.O. Everybody gets their own screen, but the on-flight film stars Jennifer Anniston so you read your magazine instead. Nobody talks to anybody or acknowledges their presence, unless you're of Middle-eastern origin - then everybody will track your every movement, ready to tackle you to the floor if you make one wrong move and tie you up with belts.

Advantage: Now, but only because of the smoking thing.

 

 

 

By Leslie Anthony

"Skiing . . . is positively thrilling no matter how well or poorly you've mastered it. From the . . . moment you begin to slide over snow, feel the tug of gravity pull you downhill, your heart and spirit exults. It is pure thrill. There are, to be sure, more than a few moments of frustration . . . But even during that painful period, there is a constant thrill . . . Once the basics have been reduced to muscle memory, skiing is a non-stop celebration of how good life can be when you live it at the edge of your self-defined envelope, be that envelope green or double black."

G.D. Maxwell, Pique Newsmagazine, April 9, 2009

I can barely remember what I did yesterday, but I clearly remember my first day of skiing. Well, maybe not clearly-more like an old Super 8 movie-but you get the picture.

Housebound on a gorgeous spring-break day sometime in the late sixties, my hyperkinetic friend Mike and I were driving my mother nuts with loud Hot Wheels races and house-wide G.I. Joe battles. In a fit of desperation, she insisted we take some dusty ski equipment that was languishing in the garage-unused since the early fifties-to the nearby Don Valley Ski Centre, a riverbank operation in one of Toronto's newly minted suburban wastelands, and give it a whirl.

"It'll be more fun than tobogganing," she said, pretty much selling us.

We wrapped chubby hands around wooden, enamel-painted skis with bear-trap bindings, bamboo poles, and boots far too big for grade-school feet, and schlepped it all to the hill. It was an arduous journey of an hour or so, and when we arrived, impatient and excited at the sight of people zipping down the slope, we still had to figure out how all this equipment worked.

We struggled with the stiff, cumbersome boots, cables, springs, and myriad straps for what seemed an eternity. The bindings seemed to defy any law of engineering gleaned from Meccano sets, Lego bricks, or tabletop hockey, but when the forward throws on the cable finally snapped down, it seemed the boots were attached to the skis. It didn't last. With each tentative step the bindings would let go, leaving us ski-less and frustrated. Only through the sympathetic intervention of adults who witnessed our comic plight (tsk-tsking over what kind of parent would cast neophyte children adrift like this) were we eventually affixed awkwardly to the planks.

We quickly mastered shuffling ahead on the skis, and eagerly got in line for the tow. As we waited our turn, I watched the fat hemp rope whiz around a small truck wheel driven by a chugging diesel engine and studied the loading procedure. It seemed simple: tuck your poles under one arm, place one hand ahead of your body, another behind your back, and grab the rope. Which was just what I did. My arms were practically ripped from their sockets as I saw snow, then sky, then snow again. I could hear the slurping, wet whoosh of a body being dragged through snow, the clack-clack of skis clapping together, and Mike's hysterical laughter. My eyes, nose, and mouth filled with snow. Finally, I'd let go of the rope.

I felt sick. The tow operator picked me up and shepherded me back to the line, where I had the satisfaction of watching the same fate befall Mike. Each of us tried a second time, with a similar result. Beaten, we sniveled around like wounded puppies until, again, someone offered to help. When we eventually made it to the top, it was like we'd been airlifted from hell to well . . . we weren't sure what.

The speed of sliding downhill was dizzying and intoxicating, the frequent wipeouts brutal and instructive. We continued to have our arms yanked numb by the speedy rope tows, fall backward off a platter lift-a spring-loaded metal pole with a plastic disc you tucked through your crotch to pull you along, itself a novelty-and skid helplessly downhill upside down, we plowed full-speed and out of control into hay bales, and generally took a massive beating from the tiny 115-foot vertical. The most vivid frames from this flickering film, however, are not of motion but notion-how it all looked and felt to my uninitiated senses.

Between runs, we sipped scalding hot chocolate from a rancid-smelling machine and queued with tanned, sunglass-adorned hedonists who reeked of coconut and spoke of Collingwood and the Laurentians, the Alps and Banff. Everyone but us-clad in jeans with flannel pajamas dangling below the cuffs-wore sleek, black stretch pants that disappeared into their boots. Smart knit sweaters, turtlenecks, and headbands out-polled jackets, scarves, and hats, making a James Bondian damn-the-elements fashion statement. European labels were legion-Piz Buin, Snik, Vuarnet, Carrera, Arlberg. This leitmotif created the very real sense of mountains, something I knew only from picture books. Amid a monotonous suburban landscape we discovered a window onto a world apart. I stared long and hard, not realizing I was viewing a tiny corner of a worldwide diaspora, an entire galaxy of alpine travel, history, and endeavor.

Mike and I were too battered to walk home, and we sheepishly used our last dime to call my mother. She cried when she saw us: we were broken, bruised, and bloodied, our pajamas shredded by rusty ski edges, the palms of our mitts torn out by the rough hemp of the rope tow. Consumed by guilt, she overlooked our shit-eating grins and did what any conflicted parent would: screamed at us for not calling her sooner.

"It's ok, mom," I smiled, unaware that I'd just experienced the closest a human can come to flying without leaving the Earth. "We had fun."

From the book White Planet: A Mad Dash through Global Ski Culture, © 2010 by Leslie Anthony, published by Greystone Books: an imprint of D&M Publishers Inc. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

 

 

By Stephen Smysnuik

 

I didn't do my homework that night. I never really did it, but this night I was too excited to concentrate. It was like I had drunk a two-litre bottle of Pepsi to myself and was too jittery to function. Never in my life until that point had I ever been this excited. Christmas was slop in the bucket compared to this. I was going to Disneyland.

It had been a tough slog waiting for this day since my parents first announced the trip and that final week leading up to our departure was pure torture. Nights were sleepless and the minutes at school dragged on as if Satan himself was trying to punish me. I suspected that he was. I'd bounce my knee relentlessly. My homework, rarely completed at the best of times, was completely ignored so I could bone up on my Lion King trivia.

My final day of class before the trip was a special day indeed. The plan was for my mother to pick myself and my younger brother and sister up at 3 p.m. sharp, meet our father at home and race down to Seattle. She had told me that morning, "Be ready right after school."

I carried myself that day with the dignified gait of a child who had been hand plucked by the richest man in the universe to be his one and only heir. I was rolling high and rolling strong and nothing could slow this boy down.

But there was, of course, Ms. Soo, my Grade 6 teacher. Eleven-year-olds have no sense of the roadblocks that may impede their progress and...no, let me rephrase - this 11-year-old had no sense of the roadblocks that may have impeded my progress.  I was a childish buffoon in those days - no different than today - for that reason Ms. Soo hated my guts.

I thought of my mushroom haircut and enormous beaver-like front teeth rather becoming but this was not enough to charm Ms. Soo. Add to that my inability to sit quietly or complete a single Social Studies assignment on time and I was charged with detention roughly 180 of the 190 days of school that year.

Detention involved sitting absolutely still for an hour after school. Some days, Ms. Soo gave the dunces some chores. She had myself and Tim, a fellow after-school regular, to help stack textbooks or dust off chalk brushes but it seemed she was strapped for chores on this day.

Each second felt one step closer toward entering, like, the pearly gates of heaven but Satan himself was holding the second hand, slowing it down, so it seemed that would it never, ever get there. And I kept playing my mother's no nonsense warning over and over: "Be ready right after school."

Mom should have known by that point that a 3 p.m. exit was not my style. But sure enough, she came charging up to the second floor of St. Paul's Elementary, mouth pursed and shriveled as she attempted to contain, with little success, her unbounded infuriation.

She walked up to Ms. Soo, explained the situation, to my great embarrassment, and the teacher let me go half an hour early. My mother led me by the ear toward the stairwell, which thinking about it now seems like something that should only occur in cartoons.

"You got a detention on our last day before vacation?" she says, clearly frustrated.

But by this point, after months of this behaviour, the frustration wasn't about keeping her waiting -though I had learned never to keep a redhead waiting.

No, I sensed even then that her frustration, as regular as it was in those days, stemmed from a fear that her first and beloved son was shaping into a gigantic failure.

 

 

By Susan Hollis

 

"Did you hide the drugs, honey?"

In only six words my dad had dropped the least clever border-crossing joke in the history of American border crossings. Even when doled out by a balding, middle-aged man in a family van stuffed to the brim with kids and luggage, drug jokes are unfunny to border patrol guards.

We were at the Pacific Border Crossing outside of Vancouver, wedged in our seats thanks to a complicated packing job that included enough clothing, camping and cooking equipment for a family of six on a three week road trip down the Pacific coast to California.

It was the 1980s and my parents had decided to take us on one ultimate family vacation before my older sister, then 17, left for a Rotary exchange in Denmark before her first year of university.

As Maritimers who have never got over the majesty of the Pacific Northwest, my parents thought an epic road adventure in our aging yellow VW van would be just the thing.

My dad, a hard-working, gregarious native of Pugwash, Nova Scotia who prides himself on his sense of humour, waited until the border guard was at the window before loudly cracking his one liner, the delivery of which he had probably been crafting since we got in line.

There he sat, winking and nudging my glowering mother with a deliberate elbow, oblivious to the iron-faced border guard who had lucked upon our brood.

I don't entirely blame dad for his misguided attempt of humour - our van was the antithesis of drug culture. Four kids between the ages of seven and 17 with various versions of saliva-crusted silver dental head gear sat in two rows behind the front seats jammed between pillows, books, tents, suitcases and an enormous cooler filled with mom-snacks for the road.

Unfortunately for dad, it wasn't enough. The intricate packing job that had taken my mother three hours to accomplish by herself while my dad wrapped up a few things at the office, was taken apart piece by piece by extremely thorough border guards as we watched from the curb. They even went so far as to rip up the van's old brown carpet. The whole process was futile - they didn't find any drugs. They couldn't even track down whatever was making the sour milk smell.

The whole episode set us back five hours, plus the time spent re-packing the van - it was a quiet ride to the Washington State campsite we stayed at that night, some 400 kilometers behind schedule.

Over the next few days we left the border incident and rain weather behind us.

Out the window a panoramic slide show of old growth and ocean unfolded to reveal warmer climes. We donned our Frogskin sunnies and cranked open the sunroof, which in those old vans took up three quarters of the roof. With the warm breezes blowing us deeper into the Sunshine State, my good ol' dad decided a cold brewski was just what the doctor ordered. Sipping a beaded brown bottle of Bud with a hand on my mom's knee and Springsteen on the radio he was the picture of bliss, oblivious to the State trooper driving beside us.

Unlike the border patrol guards, this uniform let us bumpkin Canucks off with a get out of jail free card and a hefty fine. Though we topped off the trip with an I5 breakdown in 40-degree weather and second-degree sunburn we eventually made it to Disneyland but I'll admit - it was Mom who got us the rest of the way there.



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