Four Hundred Miles in a Station Wagon (8 kids, 2 adults)

 

Mom enjoying her vacation at Bass Lake, Indiana.

When we were kids my dad never took us on fancy vacations. Unless you think a cabin on a lake with an outhouse for a toilet is fancy. I liked those vacations despite the sand in the bed, the nasty toilet fifty feet from the kitchen door, and a week in a tiny house that smelled funny. At least there was always a row boat and a lake of sorts to explore. Half the fun was the actual drive, usually between one hundred and two hundred miles. Plenty of time in the car for exciting things to happen, like the time the roof rack with all our luggage came loose and scattered across the highway.

In Mom's later years I encouraged her to start writing down some of her life experiences. She was in her nineties and had lived through the depression, World War II, and the birth of eleven children. Certainly there had to be a story there. As far as I knew she never did write it down. However, while going through her things my sister found a few hand written notes. One of the most entertaining was her account of a vacation trip to Tennessee in 1971. A trip I was not on because I was already a free adult living on my own. It was a four page letter to herself with nuggets like this one.

"Dad Locked himself out of the cabin on the way to the swimming area."

No explanation of how he got back in, or where the rest of the family was. But knowing my dad, it couldn't have been pretty. The letter starts out with this.

"In a station wagon with ten people. The first one hundred miles with the two youngest hanging over throw up bags."

For some reason Mom wrote the letter in the third person.

"Mother agrees to take over driving, and after only five minutes of driving turns off onto the wrong exit taking us completely off in the wrong direction. Big Daddy blows up and doesn't simmer down until we're back on the right road again."

I never heard Mom refer to Dad as 'Big Daddy' before. I kind of wish she had used that more often. It would have made my childhood more like living 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'. Anyway, they made it to the cabin in Tennessee and it turned out to be a bit more rustic than Dad had bargained for.

"We are now living in a forest, a dense forest. The only other cabin I can see is the one the children are sleeping in. The road - four miles of it - is narrow and winding. Up and down steep hills. It's more wilderness than we had planned on. The 'swimming area' is a roped off bit of the lake, not the pool we had expected."

With a couple of days left in the vacation, it got very hot and humid. Everybody gathered in the air conditioned cabin and stayed there. Dad's reaction was exactly what I would expect.

"So we're just going to sit inside? I can do this cheaper at home."

So they packed up and drove back home. Vacation over, Dad got to sit in his favorite chair at home and saved himself a little bit of money. I love Mom's last line of her letter to herself.

"I guess we're just not a camping type of family."

Although, at least they had air conditioning. Something I never experienced on any of Dad's lake house vacations.