Lessons from an Excellent Road Trip

We are now back in town, and as Number One Son headed off for school this morning, summer is officially over. It was full and hectic, and we capped it off with a seat-of-the-pants, hey-let’s-visit-the-Mystery-Spot road trip to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, so around here it really feels like it’s still early July. I was emptying a drawer and found the Fathers Day cards the kids had made me, and I had to think back to when that all happened. Now it’s back to the regular routines in Chicago, and it almost feels like we never left.

Here’s an unofficial recap of the trip:

Best city name we passed through: Herbster, WI.
Second place: Bete Grise, MI
Best breakfast place: The Tossed Egg, Bayfield, WI (their Bay Omelette was stuffed with smoked lake trout, onions, tomatoes, spinach and Parmesan cheese. Yowzah!)
Best sweet rolls and cherry pie: The Cherry Spot, Beulah, MI
Best Polish food: Legs Inn, Cross Junction, MI
Biggest forest fire: Stump Junction, MI
Best massive concrete bluegill: Orr, MN
Prettiest campsite: Fort Wilkins, MI, at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula
Best lake name near that campsite: Lake Fanny Hooe
Best pasty: Muldoon’s, Munising, MI
Best juxtaposition on store sign: “Wild Rice & Lobster Tails”, Superior WI
Best ripoff casino act advertised: “Shania Twin”

And the best time overall was visiting our friends’ cabin on Lake Vermilion in MN. Look for it on a map–it’s WAY the hell up there. We heard loons morning and night, saw eagles and ospreys, sailed, napped, and took REALLY hot saunas. And I taught my host to play cribbage finally, so he can fit in with the guys over at the supper club. (As happens with all my students, he started beating me regularly.) Coming back from there was quite a culture shock. Chicago looks awful crowded by comparison. Then again, Fennville MI felt awfully crowded once we got back there. Would love to visit up there every summer, but I should check that with them first.

A whole pile of articles and essays crossed my path this summer about the decline of the American Vacation. How nobody takes road trips, how they resent taking time off, how families resent spending forced time together, etc. Maybe that’s standard magazine filler at this time of year, I don’t know, but they began to piss me off pretty quickly. In June, Newsweek ran an especially stupid essay by a mom in Jersey complaining about how their road trip was ruined because her kids were all hooked into their cellphones and ipods. It was some faux-exasperated, kids-these-days-but gee-we-came-together-anyway claptrap that was especially suspect when the writer admitted to checking her emails on her laptop a couple times a day in the car. Hey Chowderhead! Leave your laptop at home, and maybe your kids will talk to you!

On our trip we drove 2400 miles, and the most complicated electronic device we had was the car CD player. (We did have our cells along, but as if unplugged by some benevolent vacation god, the voice mail didn’t work once we drove over the Mackinac Bridge, and we gradually just stopped thinking about them.) Our kids read, drew, laced gimp, and played cards the whole way up and back. No movies, no Gameboys, no nothing. Their greatest fun was memorizing the songs on the CD by Da Yoopers we bought at their Toorist Trap in Ishpeming, with such hits as “Second Week of Deer Camp”, “Beer Guts of America” and “Diarrhea”. And by the time we got back here, this family was one well-functioning machine–with the kids helping around the house, being courteous to one another, and all that stuff that people say they’d like their kids to be but don’t take the time to teach them.

So enough with the insincere crap about how you miss the kinds of road trips you used to take when you were a kid, because Today’s Kidz just won’t stand for aimless hours in the car and tourist traps anymore. If you really want to take those trips, do the planning and teach your kids early not to depend on electronics and movies to entertain them. Teach them to set up their own tent, and suffer through a chilly morning in camp once in a while. Read books out loud to each other in the car. You’d be amazed how quickly all the “necessities” of modern life just drop by the wayside.