Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Cami Hepler - Hickory, NC
When I saw that the Write Scott’s Column While He’s on Vacation contest was back again this year, I was mildly interested. Then I noticed that “suspect parental decisions” was one of the topics you could earn extra points for. I knew then that I could write a column that would be a shoe-in to win because my parents have made more suspect decisions over the years than that crazy chick who stalked David Letterman.
The earliest one that comes to mind (and also probably the biggest) involved selling almost everything we owned, packing some clothes, and taking off on a journey criss-crossing the country. Now, you’d need to know that my parents were just out of college (aka without much money) and it was 1976. So, we weren’t staying in fabulous four-star hotels around the country. No, this was the heyday of camping and we were “roughing it.” No RV, no big pull-behind camper like my grandparents, not even one of those little pop-up campers like my best friend’s family had. You know the ones I’m talking about? Those weird little 3-foot tall flat boxes that, as a kid, I thought looked like a home for midgets but then the cloth insides emerge and it magically mutates into some kind of glorified 4-man tent. That had to be where the cartoon makers got the idea for the Transformers, but I digress. Anyway, we had none of those things. Nope. We were going to transverse the United States in a green Volkswagen van. Two adults and a five-year-old drove/rode, lived, slept, and often times ate our meals, in that Volkswagen van. And we stayed on the road for four months! Our days were filled with driving and singing “We all live in a green Volks-ey van,” to the tune of the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine, and me eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every single day for lunch because I didn’t like the lunchmeat that sustained my parents.
I guess it was the fact that I was starting kindergarten that fall that made my parents seize the opportunity to take a trip that they knew probably wouldn’t be feasible as I got older. I’ve often wondered what caused two adults in their right minds to want to live on the road with a five-year-old for a full one-third of a year. During my teenage years, it was obvious to me that they weren’t in their “right minds” ever, and I determined their altered minds were perhaps attributable to having lived through the 1960’s. But, as Mark Twain said, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
And so over the years, I’ve looked back on that trip with fondness at just how much of it I remember to this day and amazement at the sacrifices my parents made to make it happen. We gazed over the Grand Canyon and spent a practically-unbearable 104-degree night camping in Las Vegas. I learned to be a cowgirl in Montana complete with hat and holster but grew to realize that I never want to camp and “rough it” again. We spent three of the most magical days of my childhood at Disneyland and it cost them almost as much as the entire trip from North Carolina to California had.
It inspired in me a love of travel and started me down the path towards a goal of seeing all 50 states before I turn 50. I’m 37 now and have been to 35 states so I’m well on my way. I’m no longer the child who returned from the trip to start school in the fall as the only kindergartner in the entire world who despised peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But, I have come to realize that some of those suspect parental decisions turn out really well. I said “some,” Dad. Turning our home into a makeshift farm with chickens and a goat still counts as suspect to me. But, that’s a story for another day.
