Family Vacations

[Deleted]

When I was growing up our family did not take long family holidays together in the summertime like most families did. The main reason is during that time of year the potatoes were nearing harvest and it was imperative that during those last remaining weeks someone monitor them closely.
Most of our holidays together were with extended family members. My mother's family lived on the North Shore of Long Island and trips over there were always a treat for us.
We did however,one year,after harvest,go on a cruise together from NY Harbor to Nova Scotia.
It was the first and only time that I have ever been on a large ocean liner and was a memorable occassion. I remember how very cold it was on board the ship and how even colder it was when we reached Halifax.The cold and the sight of the rocky shoreline was in direct contrast to my idea that we were en route to a tropical paradise. In any event it was a memorable trip.
Tell us about your family vacations,where you went and your memories of.

[Deleted]

The very first family vacation that I recall was a trip to the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina when I must have been about 5 years old. I remember seeing the little black bears on the road that you weren't supposed to feed, but everybody did, because they would come up to the cars to beg. I also remember stopping at Harper's Ferry which was of some Civil War importance, and I know that we also went to Washington, D.C. on the same trip, because there are some ancient photos that attest to this, although I have no specific memory of anything that I saw there except for the changing of the guard at Arlington cemetery.

It's strange what sticks in the mind of a small child.

[tillystar]

Our family holidays always revolved around spending days and days in the back of a car/van/bus. My parents were teachers so we usually drove for the whole 6 weeks holidays each summer.

Until I was about 8 we drove to the USSR each summer with a bus full of students and stayed on the same campsite just outside Moscow. I have some really interesting memories but the ones that stays with my most clearly is the smell of the toilets

They stopped running these trips and so we then would spend 6 weeks driving around France and the memory that sticks with me most of that is that we had a hole in the floor of our car and my brother and I used to lie on the floor and look through it while my Mum would threaten to pull over before one of us lost our eyes.

Looking back they were such great holidays but at the time I would have killed for parents who would take us on a package tour to Spain and stay in a nice hotel with a buffet.

[imec]

I have vague memories of a cottage in Anglesey, Wales and reasonably good recollection of a week in Ireland. Both before I was 8. Not much else.

[cristina]

When I was young, we would usually spend the better part of the summer either in Virginia Beach or at a Delaware beach. My Dad would usually spend a week with us and then commute from Washington on the weekends.

My best memories of those summers were eating crabs and the best corn on the cob on the planet.

[Deleted]

One of my most vivid family holiday memories revolves around a weekend car trip we took to visit some cousins in Upstate N.Y. On the way home the car broke down in the middle of the night. It broke down right next to this edifice. While my father went to look for some help or use the telephone the proprietors of this place let us kids go inside and explore. It is still there to this day although, I believe it has been moved and attempts to do away with it have been thwarted by some organization called Save the Duck(SAD).



Oh,and the reason for it being there was because in a bygone era Long Island had a plethora of duck farms. Long Island Duckling was famous for several decades.

[auntieannie]

Every holiday of my childhood, until adolescence, was spent in chalet in the mountains that my father part build himself. He would join us at weekends and he would take four days every summer to drive us around - the only way for him to avoid customers knocking at the door of the chalet asking him to arrange work. during these four day summer forays, we visited each year a part of Switzerland and we also twice went to visit our great-aunts Constance and Helene in the South of France, near Marseille.

When I was adolescent in the mid-eighties, my parents acquired a house in Spain's Catalan region with another couple and I accompanied them there for a few years. They sold that house a few years ago.

[happytraveller]

I have very fond childhood memories of our holidays. We always went camping in either Italy or France but the best holidays where the 3 trips to Corsica when I was 9, 10 and 11 years old. We would always go with my god mothers family, they have a daughter my age and we were very close friends. Oooch... the excitement, the ferry trip across to Corsica, camping on some pretty wild campgrounds and sometimes we would do a trip to the other side of the island and sleep on the beach or on a campground (outside, as our big family tent was "parked" on the other side of the island on the campground) We always had a ball ! I remember, the 3rd time we were in Corsica, we set up out tent really far a way from the toilets, actually the campground owner was not even sure if we were still on the campground territory. We had a phantastic view from up there and because we didn't want to have to walk 10 minutes to the toilet, we built our own open air loo. Dad found an old chair frame in the rubbish. We placed this chair away from the tent in the bush and made a hole underneath...
;D
Silly things we used to do !

edited to add:
When I was 12, my parents "unfortunately" bought a small holiday house near a lake in Switzerland. That was the end of our exciting camping trips

[Deleted]

How many people are familiar with this item,?Known as a Scotch Cooler,it went everywhere we did. Funny,my brother bought one at a yard sale some years back and was so pleased with himself. My mother and I rolled our eyes. It was pretty funny.

[hwinpp]

Is that what the Aussies call an esky? Watertight and able to hold ice to keep drinks cool? In the middle east it used to be called a Coolman which was also the name of the company that sold them. They were always blue or red I think.

[Deleted]

As a child it seemed like the bottomless pit of never ending goodies that lived inside that thing. I do remember trying to pry the lid off once and couldn't. But then my brothers would pry it open,snatch something and then blame me for it.

[hwinpp]

LOL!

I never had to deal with brothers, I'm the oldest! Now sisters OTOH...

[Deleted]

One time when my mother brought us to France, we took a long road trip all over the country with my grandmother. My mother used my grandfather's Renault Dauphine -- he stayed at home, because he never understood why people wanted to travel anyway. We covered just about all of the country, and this was in the days before autoroutes, so it required some determined driving, especially in the mountains.

I remember that we had a fantastic time, so much so that we spent the last two nights in Nancy, only about 50km from home, just so we didn't have to go back to the ordinary routine already. I think this was mostly at my grandmother's request, because she needed a break from her cranky husband.

[Deleted]

Even if we didn't go on regular vacations because of the need to have someone tend the farm,we ALWAYS no matter what,took a Sunday drive. I think it was mostly for my father to get away from the farm and be able to see what was going on in the outside world. I remember he always looked so calm and relaxed on these drives without a care in the world.

[Deleted]

We used to take Sunday drives as well, often to the backwoods. It never ceased to amaze me how the area could change so fast as you drove away from the coast. The coastal towns were relatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan, all things considered, but as you reached the back bayous, there were all of these people living in rickety shacks, some without electricity, and we felt as though we had gone back in time 200 years.

[Kimby]

As far back as I can remember our family took a 2 or 3 week road trip every summer, eventually covering most of the United States.

We three girls would visit the library beforehand and the librarian would bend the rules, checking out 20-30 books to each of us for the whole vacation (rental period was only 2 weeks in those days). We would spend the long days of driving reading and playing road games: How many states and provinces license plates could we see? Highway bingo. Looking for the letters of the alphabet in signs, etc. Sometimes we kept journals, sometimes we didn't. We played with our Barbies and fought over who had to sit in the middle of the back seat. The loser often just climbed over the seat and lounged in the way back. We bickered so much that Dad would give us a quarter each day we were good, and we'd use it to buy souvenirs and candy. (Dad jokes that he gave us a dollar each day we were bad and when we had enough for a train ticket, he'd send us home!)

Often my grandmother would join us after Grandpa died, making 6 of us in a station wagon, pulling a travel trailer that slept 6, barely. Mom cooked, but not normal food - we ate spaghetti out of a can, apricot nectar, canned pears, things we never ate at home. We each got one tiny drawer in the trailer for our clothes, and there was no bathroom, so if nature called at night when we were little, we used a honeypot.

We visited a new region every trip, and went to almost all the major national parks. My husband's family did almost the same trips, but stayed in motels and lodges instead of campgrounds.

I'm enjoying re-visiting the parks with my husband now, but he and I aren't the truckers my parents are when it comes to driving. We'll drive to Southern Utah, or the Pacific Northwest, or the Canadian Rockies, but much farther than that and we fly. Of course, we don't have kids, so we don't feel the urge to educate the next generation the way our families educated us.

[bazfaz]

We lived in Toronto when I was a boy. My parents used to rent a log cabin near Burnt River (how did they do that?) 100 miles north of Toronto. The cabin was on a lake so there was lots to do. My father took 2 weeks vacation there and then would drive up for weekends when he went back to work. By about Thursday our food supplies would run low and my mother would tell me to catch something to eat for supper. I would go out on the lake and fish for bass. I was 8 or 9. Making a kid as young as that go out on a lake alone would now be seen as criminally irresponsible. And as for going into the woods alone gathering strawberries when there were black bears....

[Deleted]

Good observation Baz about children being allowed to explore on their own"unattended". These days that would be considered negligent and irresponsible. How fortunate we were to live in such an era of more carefree attitudes. We were allowed to go and explore on our own and never be hassled or fretted over hysterically.

[bixaorellana]

We lived in Alaska when I was four or five. There was a big thicket in front of our base housing that was full of blueberries. My mother told us not to go there alone, as there were bears. We disobeyed a few times and were not eaten, although I don't know that having an adult along would have made any difference anyway.

I pretty much grew up in a car. We moved frequently because my dad was in the Air Force, plus spent every summer when we were in the States (Alaska wasn't in the States then) at my grandparents' house. Some of our vacation destinations must have been on the way to or from where Daddy was stationed, but they were vacations nonetheless.

The time spent as my grandparents was always treasured. In a small town, all the kids could run around until after dark playing hide-and-seek until suppertime. The movie theater was across the street from my grandparents' house -- forever frozen in my mind as
time spent cutting up while standing in line in the muggy night as june bugs blundered around the buzzing lighted sign.

I remember my first view of the ocean -- I was three or barely four. That must have been when we saw the Grand Canyon, too, and I still retain the memory of looking down, down, down and seeing clouds.

We took a wonderful trip to Mount McKinley. I remember the train through the mountains and trying to ice skate.

Another mountain trip was a family vacation to the north of Spain, with towering evergreens rising out of the mist. We stopped to drink icy water from a fountain coming out of the living rock. In Galicia we saw the funny raised silos (?) and people in wooden shoes, including a couple of groups walking along the road playing bagpipes.

A truly great vacation for us kids was the summer we spent in Torremolinos. Remember, this was way before condos and package-holidays. My dad somehow managed to score the use of some general's love nest, which was all 50s moderne, right on the beach. We made friends with an English girl and her little brother, whose family was there on vacation, plus some kids of various nationalities from the beatnik colony. This was a extended vacation, and I remember we started school late that year because of it. It was long summer hours of unsupervised fun. There must have been some adult intervention, as I remember one day we had the use of a burro or mule. We kids returned it later to its farm and passed part of the afternoon sitting under the grape arbor with the farmer's family.

[rikita]

we went on holiday for three weeks every summer until i was 17, maybe sometimes a bit shorter or longer. sometimes we went to a church-holiday-house in mecklemburg, but usually that was reserved for shorter trips in the fall. when i was really small i think we sometimes went to the coast (baltic sea). most common was going to poland though. i remember when i was quite little, we still had our trabant, my dad would joke when we were on the road to my polish aunt's house - the road was always overgrown, so he'd pretend the car is chuckling because it tickles. that really impressed me as a child. also i remember when we were in g'dansk and had pizza there, which i never had before.

later we didn't so much go to my aunt, but camping in various regions of poland. we had one favourite lake, near which we'd always spend a week, and then the rest of the time at other places. these holidays were usually together with my godmother and her friends from hamburg - the friends had children our age.

after the wall came down we didn't really go to poland that often anymore, but for example to sweden (when i was 12, 14 and 15) or also sometimes to a different village in mecklemburg. the last holiday were all three of us kids traveled together with our parents, when i was 17, we went to poland again.

[Deleted]

the car is chuckling because it tickles

I absolutely love that image.

[Deleted]

Great memories Rikita. What is a "trabant",a type of car?
I had an opportunity to visit that part of the world in the late 1980's and at the last minute was unable to go.It was a trip with two other Polish/American women.

[bjd]

The Trabant is/was an East German car that has now become rather fashionable as a nostalgic item. I think they were probably pretty bad cars, but they were cheap. I remember Polish relatives telling me that Poles called them "soap dishes" because they were made of plastic.

Last year in Berlin and in Poland, I saw Trabants used as advertising for shops, one in Krakow used for "Communist Tours", and in Berlin I took a picture of one with a bumper sticker on it saying "Trabant Legende Auf Rädern" -- Trabant, A Legend on Wheels.

[Deleted]

Thanks bjd. (they almost sounded like a type of potato,'brabant').
People in the U.S. I remember were and some still are nostalgic for the old wood paneled station wagons,'woodies'.

[rikita]

of course, also the motors were so dirty and bad that they became forbidden soon after the wall came done - too much fumes coming out.

[fumobici]

They showed a redone green concept electric version at the Geneva Motor Show this year that was both completely at odds with the original DDR version and more than a little ridiculous. Westerners might remember them from the U2 video for the song "One" with the interesting paint jobs.

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[bixaorellana]

I think it's adorable!

[Don Cuevas]

"Another mountain trip was a family vacation to the north of Spain, with towering evergreens rising out of the mist. We stopped to drink icy water from a fountain coming out of the living rock. In Galicia we saw the funny raised silos (?) and people in wooden shoes, including a couple of groups walking along the road playing bagpipes."

I love northern Spain.

The raised silos are "hórreos".

[bixaorellana]

WOW -- that hit me with a blast of memory! It actually brought tears to my eyes. Thank you, Don Cuevas!