"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 must have too. I don't know why, because none of my friends ever went on a trip with their families. My family, however, did travel somewhere every summer. These family trips were never anything spectacular, no vacations in the south of France, or even south of the Border.

It was a simpler time. People didn't have to jump in a plane and travel half-way 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 be new and different for me and my sister Pat. Everything was an adventure for us. And everywhere we went, our eyes bugged out in wonder and awe.

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, no down time, not even on vacation.

Perhaps mine is the last generation to live through that simpler, idealistic time. We didn't know anything. And that was totally acceptable.

So that's what you have just read over the last month or so. All those memories from an idealistic youth, a simpler time. A time when it was all right to spend time with just Mom, Dad and your sister.

As if I had a choice.

Pat, me and Mom just inside the camper door in 1967.