By Leslie Watson

Always an easy target for a quick laugh, the family vacation’s comedic potential was long ago strip-mined beyond reclamation. But the fundamental truth still remains, at least for me:  when it comes to bang for the buck, the yearly getaway tends to be a hit-or-miss proposition.

That fact has been on my mind quite a bit lately as we ready ourselves for a trip to Hawaii that has been in the works for over 18 months. It’s a vacation that was conceived and largely paid for back in the olden days, before I left the regular workforce and the global economy took its dramatic, headlong dive. (Not to suggest that those two events are related, of course.) As surreal as it may seem against the backdrop of the new, uniformly terrible financial reality, the trip is non-refundable and so it’s a go, assuming the airline doesn’t go bankrupt beforehand.

I should be excited, and I am—I mean, we’re talking about paradise here. Still, I can’t help but worry that we’re heading toward a very expensive encounter with the brick wall of vacation reality. Past experience has shown that somehow, no matter how carefully I plan and orchestrate, our family trips never quite generate the magical memories that I envision. 

My husband might agree through clenched teeth, but this observation would no doubt bewilder Ned and Helen. In fact, I’m quite sure that they would describe all of our past vacations as smashingly successful. Somehow, they always seem to forget about the crowds and long lines; the faulty Yahoo maps and rough sheets; the occasional throwing up in public places; and the crying, fighting, spilled drinks and flying parental threats that are the hallmarks of our family’s past voyages.

It’s no surprise, really. After all, a Super 8 is an adventure waiting to happen when you’re five or seven and you live in a house with no cable or satellite TV. “There’s a television right in front of the bed in this hotel, too!” they’ve been known to say, all innocent amazement. If asked, they would probably also excitedly point out that road trips are the only time they are taken to Perkins, where chocolate chips, whipped cream and sprinkles coexist so satisfactorily on the top of white-flour pancakes.

For me, though, these perks—while admittedly fantastic—aren’t quite enough to justify the expense and effort of staging a trip. It’s a little hard to admit, since I am the family’s self-appointed vacation cheerleader, but I usually end up just feeling relieved to come home. Given that, I’m not sure why I keep trying. Could it be that I view consumer spending as a good way to bring my family closer together? Am I trying to escape the temporarily narrowed horizons of life with small children? Or is it that I’m drawn to the idea of showing the world to my kids, whose sense of wonder is still so unsullied? That excuse is a little less damning, but it still doesn’t get me off the hook. It’s easy to stoke Ned’s and Helen’s excitement about faraway places, especially ones that involve palm trees, but at their age, they would probably be almost as happy if we spent a weekend building forts and playing board games in our living room.

And while we’re confronting uncomfortable truths here, I have to say that my efforts to impress them with the world’s wonders have so far fallen a bit flat. Last year, for instance, I decided to turn a road trip to a family gathering in Chicago into a cultural excursion, complete with visits to sculpture parks and celebrated museums. The kids couldn’t tell you much about those  stops, but, predictably, they are still talking about the whirlpool and the sugar-coated breakfast buffet at the suburban Marriott where we stayed.

Of course, with so many more important things to worry about now, it’s all starting to feel like a moot point, so that vacation-related anxiety suddenly seems as much a luxury as the vacation itself. Stripped of it, I’m left with a sense of real gratitude that my kids are content with relative simplicity.

I can also see more clearly that any dissatisfaction with past journeys lies squarely with me, and my unspoken expectation that the nature of life with young kids should somehow alter when one leaves home for a week. Childrearing is a complicated mixture of drudgery and the sublime, and changing the setting doesn’t really change that equation. Even on a tropical island, noses still run and people get cranky when dinner is late.

On the flip side, our best times together as a family, whether at home or away, happen when we maintain a certain looseness in how we interact, and remember to find unexpected joy in the silliest and most mundane things. It turns out that the exotic destination is just a fancy trapping—the whipped cream and sprinkle, if you will—while the substance of the experience is that we’re having it together.

In our house, when a kid complains about some imagined injustice or deprivation, the response is always the same:  “You get what you get, and you don’t have a fit.” As I think about our remarkable good fortune in being able to travel to a sandy beach in the middle of the coming Minnesota winter, it seems like awfully good advice for me, too. In fact, I’m going to keep that lesson in mind as I set aside my half-empty glass and join my family for one last serving of pancakes in paradise.

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