Family Vacatioins

  I recently joined a personal history group with some of the ladies at church.  Each months a few subjects are randomly chosen to write about.  I decided I to share what I've written here.  Family, feel free to chime in and clarify events or tell me just where this first picture was taken.

Family Vacations always started early.  When I was younger it was 5 am so we would miss traffic.  As a teenager it became 2 or 3 am because my Dad had trouble sleeping and he figured if he wasn’t sleeping he might as well be driving.  My Dad liked to travel but didn’t like to visit the same place twice so by the time I turned 18 I probably had visited just about every National Park and major destination in the west.  From Lassen to Carlsbad Caverns, Grand Canyon to Banff Canada, Yellowstone to Yosemite I've visited them all.  Now that I have kids of my own I am trying to figure out how to take them to all the places I visited as a kid. 

Mono Lake 2012 Hyrum, John, Alan, Me                               Mono Lake 1993 Ron, Dad, Brent, Lawanna, Me    

Vacations always involved long road trips.  The only times I flew as a kid was when we went to visit my Mom’s parents in Texas.   Though I hated the long drives, a lot of my fond memories came from the drives.  My mom didn't simply have us all sitting in the car together watching TV, but she had us playing together.  

Our vacations were almost always camping.  I loved sitting around the campfire listening to my older siblings tell stories.  I also loved looking up at the stars at night, amazed by how many more stars could be seen than in the city.  One night in particular I remember lying with my family on a picnic blanket out in a meadow and there was a meteor shower.  

We had a large brown tent.  It had a tarp that hung from the middle dividing it into two rooms.  The boys slept on one side and the girls on the other. My parents would sleep in the van.  On one particular camping trip I woke up early in the morning to find that I had been sleeping in a puddle.   My pillow was dripping wet.   It had started raining in the middle of the night and as it turned out our old tent had gotten quite a few holes in it.  My two oldest sisters were already awake from the storm and were deciding whether or not to go wake my parents.  They finally decided that sleeping in puddles was overrated and decided to go wake them up.  When my sister went to go outside we discovered that not only did our tent have holes but the zipper broke too.  We were stuck inside, wet, while my parents slept peacefully in our van.  After about a half hour of fighting with the zipper we got it open maybe a foot.  Being the youngest and smallest I was voted to squeeze out the hole and wake my parents.   So I went out into the pouring rain to bang on the car window, wake my parents and inform them that their children were trapped in the tent sleeping in puddles of water.  We packed up a day early and headed home.  As you might imagine, the tent, went in the garbage.