Traveling with parents can be an enlightening experience for children. Traveling with my parents always made me wonder why they did not get divorced before we left the driveway. Chaos reigned from the moment the vacation planning started. Anticipation, excitement, and pandemonium were the norm in the house. Parents tend to do strange things at this time. My mother would clean the house from top to bottom. Everything had to be clean. I assume this was for the benefit of any burglars. God forbid they broke in and the house was messy. My father, on the other hand, began to moan and groan as if was going in for a two hospital stay.

My mother assumed many roles for the family vacations. Her main role, and I am sure my Dad would have agreed, was that of “Backseat Driver”. My Mom raised backseat driving to an art form. Honestly I really don’t know how my father drove the car when she was not actually with hm. I am sure she could not figure that out herself. She told him when to stop, when to go, when to speed up and when to slow down. She always read the road map and then made him stop to ask for directions. Leaving on a trip was the equivalent of planning an invasion on foreign soil.

Food as always the other big part of a road trip. My mother was a professional shopper. Family road trips were just a good excuse to practice her technique. The amount of food my mom would buy would feed a small third world nation. There were Doo Dads, Cheese Nips, Twinkies, boiled eggs, drinks, and ALWAYS a Lemon Supreme Cake. I can still remember my dad carrying on about “the food your mother brings on these trips!” It was a standard gripe with him. He uttered this phrase every year without missing a beat. Thirty minutes into the trip he would reach his hand over the backseat and ask mom for a slice of cake and a boiled egg.

On arrival at our motel, I was always glad to get out of the car and breathe a sigh of relief. This was short lived because the car had to be unloaded. This activity probably would have been time consuming if not for the organizing efforts of our chief supervisor, My Mom. That woman could bark orders better than any drill sergeant my dad ever had in the Army Air Core. In no time at all, the car was unloaded and everything was put away in its proper place. My dad, by this time, was ready to be put away in the first available rubber room.

Sleep was the one thing everyone could agree on by the end of the evening. We all crawled into bed and I was lucky enough to get to sleep with my moms dog, Poochy. Poochy always managed to crawl her way to the head of the bed in the middle of the night. There is nothing worse than dog breath waking you up first thing in the morning.

Although I loved my parents dearly, I had to wonder how they could travel together and not kill each other. Heaven knows they made the normal threats to my brother and I. Everything from leaving us on the side of the road or being dropped of at a service station and left. I do not think they really would have done it, by I could be wrong. As I look back on these once a year vacations, I realize they left a big impression on me.

I do clean my house before I leave home. I do pack snacks on road trips and did that too when we traveled when the kids were small. When I get to my hotel, I unpack everything and put it in its proper place. I do not have a backseat driver but I instead have an annoying maps app that tells me where to turn and such. It is funny the things you remember and the marks they leave on you. I miss my parents everyday , but I carry them with me always. And sometimes they surface through me in the most interesting ways.

By…MAC