Journal of Our Journeys

 Years ago, I wrote about the family camping trips I went on as a kid. I posted them to my blog, along with scanned, often black and white pictures from those travels. Recently, I dragged out those stories and decided to edit them and slap them into a book. It won't be a book I will promote to the masses or to critical strangers, but a book to share with my family and interested close friends. Or with the innocent followers of my blog. 

Over the next twenty Wednesdays, I'll share a chapter a week from the Journal of Our Journeys. And maybe someday, it will be available as a paperback for you to hold in your hands. 

Chapter 1 - "The Family Vacation"

"When I was a child... I thought like a child." 1 Corinthians 13:11 (NIV)

 

Which is why, when I was a kid, I thought that since my family went on a trip every summer, everyone else's must have too. I don't know why because none of my friends ever went on a vacation with their families. My family, however, did travel somewhere every summer. These family trips were never spectacular, no vacations in the south of France or even south of the Border.

          My middle-school friend once asked me if Mac, our family mutt, stayed in the hotel with us on vacation. I was dumbfounded. Hotel? I can count on one hand the number of times I stayed in a motel, hotel, or inn before I was old enough to drop out of college. I must not have been a very sharing friend not to have told her about the camper.

          Nope, we never stayed in motels or even resort cabins. We slept, ate, and played cribbage in Dad's pickup camper. Along with the faithful dog.

            It was a simpler time. People didn't have to jump on a plane and travel halfway around the world to see new and different things. Growing up in the sixties and seventies in the rural upper Midwest, it took very little actually to get us excited. Everything was new and different for my sister Pat and me. Everything was an adventure for us. And everywhere we went, our eyes bugged out in wonder and awe. And our lungs filled with laughter.

            I could never imagine having had a childhood like the kids today. Where it is go, go, go, all the time, non-stop. A barrage of internet images, high-speed everything, information overload, and your favorite song is always available on YouTube. A cell phone in everyone's hand, a finger or thumb scrolling up or tap, tap, tapping in an attempt to get more points than Rusty McNutts, who you assume is another twelve-year-old but is actually a forty-year-old creeper.

And it never stops, even on vacation. While riding down the road, today’s kids watch cartoons on the TV screen in the back seat of the family mini-van, instead of absorbing all the marvels passing them by on the side of the road.

            Mine is the last generation to live through that simpler time. We didn't know anything. We didn't get carpal tunnel or tech-neck. We ate SpaghettiOs for supper and Wheaties for breakfast. We didn't play team sports; we played dodgeball and tetherball at recess unless there was snow, and then we had snowball fights. And that's the way it was.

            All those memories from an uncomplicated youth. It was a time when it was all right to spend time with just Mom, Dad, your sister, and, of course, the dog.

            As if I had a choice.