Friday, May 17, 2013

Your Turn

With this weekend marking the start of summer in Canada and next weekend here in the States, I thought I would ask everyone what their favorite childhood vacation was or their worst.


30 comments:

  1. Worst is easy. Going away with parents, then dad wld drink, my mother wld pick a fight, me and my sister out on swings, hoping they be done soon. Good times. My parents were pretty good, but this arguing was awful. Ugh

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous10:08 AM

    I never went on a childhood vacation unless you count visiting relatives. Never. As a result of this I traveled Europe on my own dime in college and have been to 43 US states and Mexico. Before the age of 18 I had been to 4. My parents still will not travel anywhere. I think they live their whole lives within a ten mile radius of their house.
    We don't have any family pictures of all of us together either.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Summer doesn't officially start until June 21st...unless Enty means that Memorial weekend everyone starts thinking it's summer time. But it rains half the time Memorial weekend here in Norther Cal.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. @MAC. I start getting twitchy at the mere mention of Memorial Day Weekend. The Jazz Festival and all those drunk tourists driving the wrong way down the one way streets. I used to leave town and visit my mother in Merced (or even Clovis when she lived there.) Now that she lives with me, I hide in the house until it's over.

      Delete
  4. Worst was getting stuck in a white out with trucks jack knifing everywhere. Best was any summer we spent at my grandparents lake house in Michigan.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Going to Maine is always a favorite summer vacation.

    ReplyDelete
  6. My parents never, ever took us on vacation. We would just move every summer due to my mother's obsession with flipping houses in LA. They would never spend money on vacations.
    My husband's family never went on vacations either.
    We take our kids on a vacation every summer. Big vacations generally out of the country. This year we are just taking a cruise, but we are including the boyfriend and the girlfriend.
    The worst thing that happened was the day we were in Paris on Bastille standing in front of the Eiffel Tower during the worst thunderstorm ever. There were so many people there for the holiday that virtually every place included in our tour was closed.
    It was the craziest experience of our lives and I wouldn't change a single thing about that day.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Best was extended-family vacays to Long Point Beach up in Ontario (Canada) when I was a kid. Have v. happy thoughts and memories of those.

    Can't think of a worst.

    ReplyDelete
  8. The best was going to Colorado when I was a teenager. I still want to move there.

    ReplyDelete
  9. My Dad always had wonderful roads trips for us in the summer. I think I have thrown up on most every interstate in California. Other than that...good times...

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous11:36 AM

    Good topic. I like my life the best now, my summer lasts most of the year living in Cali. I do outdoorsy fun stuff almost every day. Didn't do crap when I was a kid during summertime, maybe try to beat super mario brothers, and go to summer school. Mom was always a stress case A type spaz, Sis was an uber bitch, so road trips and disney land were not fun.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I don't know, I grew-up so close to Yosemite that most weekends turned into mini-vacations (which was really all about my parents could afford.) We would literally run into family members we hadn't talked to in weeks while we were up there.

    As a kid, probably the time we went to Great America. We camped out in the back of the van, my sister and I were given free range of the park by my parents (as long as we met them periodically) and I terrorized my little sister by making her go on the Demon with me.

    As an adult, last summer we took all the kids to San Diego for a week. My daughter (who turned three while we were down there) had been obsessed with going to the beach and it was a lot of fun to get to take her. I also got to take her to Sea World to see "Willy" on her birthday, which was pretty fun.

    This year, we'll be at Disneyland for her fourth birthday, so I'm expecting it to top the last one. *g*

    ReplyDelete
  12. All my vacations as a child were spent in the back of cars on long, long road trips, every night spent in another cheap motel.

    Once we hit our destination, it was just for a day or two then the whole process in reverse.

    This is probably why I don't do vacations with my own family and why I hate driving (or simply being in cars) so much.

    The most memorable was in the mid-1980s when we went to Yellowstone while it was mostly on fire.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Most of them, if not all, were bad because we were just dysfunctional. Dad with undiagnosed PTSD, brother with undiagnosed mental illness, my mother the accomdater and me with the mouth.

    The most upsetting was a family visit to my grandparents about 14 hours away when I was about 6. I woke up one morning and found my family had gone home, leaving me behind. I was pretty traumatized even though I loved my grands.

    All we ever did on vacations was go to a relative's house or rent a cabin on a lake in Maine. That was okay as a kid but as a teen I wanted to be anywhere other than in some small cabin with the fam damily.

    Oh, there was the time when I was 16yo when we had a family vacation to Europe and I was going to stay home until my parents (wisely) thought better of that plan so I flew over solo on a flight about six hours behind them. Three weeks of torture, half of which was caused by me and my teenagery-ness. But the fist fight with my brother in the back of an Opel on a ferry to Germany stands out as the nadir. Then my parents tried to make us share beds at B&B's. The horror. On that trip we also stayed at some manor house where the meals were communal and the first night was liver stew. OMG, NO. That was the one time my brother and I united. LOL

    ReplyDelete
  14. As a child, we always traveled to one grandparents house then the other, cross country. A big 3000 mile triangle. When I was about 15, my dad finally got tired of wasting his vacation time visiting family so decided to take us 5 kids and mom on an amusement park vacation...in a station wagon. :) We traveled all over the country for a month, camping along the way. We started at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, sailed across Lake Erie into Canada and back (just to say we did),went to Niagara Falls, saw all sorts of military battlegrounds and monuments, body surfed in Cape May, New Jersey, went crabbing off the side of a bridge in Virginia, down to Busch Gardens and Disney World to 6 Flags Over Texas. We floated down rivers in Concan, Texas, saw the bats at Carlsbad Caverns in NM. Went to Elitch Gardens in Colorado when it was just a neighborhood amusement park and not owned by the Six Flags people. We took random exits and found farmers selling ice cold watermelons, and ate lots of chocolate covered ice cream cones from DQ... hiked where Davy Crocket traveled and visited Kings Island in Ohio before heading back home. My mom read Survive the Savage Sea to us as we drove. :) Best Vacation Ever! My mom must have been exhausted!

    ReplyDelete
  15. We always went on camping trips every summer (luckily we had a trailer so it was comfortable). Some summers we went with a group of friends which was fun and sometimes by ourselves. Then there were a few long vacations where we traveled from California to South Dakota and Minnesota to visit family, but along the way we stopped at a lot of places for site-seeing - kind of like Vacation.

    ReplyDelete
  16. First time I went on vacation I was 20. Went with family to a rental home in Sea Isle, right on the beach. No one killed each other. One grandmother, 4 daughters, 2 with husbands, and 5 grandchildren. It was a great time. Never did it again.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Best and Worst in one summer.
    I went to stay with my grandparents in Oregon to pick raspberries and beans to make money. A really fun time, away from my tyrannical dad and a great group of kids to hang out with all summer.

    My folks pick me up and we drive back to Washington, where I find that two days before high school starts...my folks have moved, I don't even know what town I live in.

    ReplyDelete
  18. I have no bad summer memories. Either I'm very lucky or have a major case of selective memory syndrome.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Oh and my best summer memory. Every year we would go to Cannes for a month. We'd stay in the Hotel Martinez. It was before the Russian mafia invaded the south of France so it was still pretty safe. I remember one summer Elton John was staying in the Martinez while filming the video for I'm Still Standing. I was about 5 or 6 and incredibly shy. My mum and grandad and my nanny kept pushing me to go get an autograph but I was too embarrassed. But we saw him loads of times. Anytime I see that video I have very very happy memories.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Worst vacation was the summer after my grandmother died. The Aunts insisted we all take a vacation to Rosarito, Mexico...and stay in one house. 4 aunts, 3 uncles, an uncle and his GF, my parents, 9 cousins, and me in a 4 bedroom beach house. The first night there we got stuck sleeping in our car. Half the family are early risers, the half are not, so we hardly got to do anything together because of people's preferred schedules. Needless to say it's been 18 years since and nothing remotely close has happened again.

    Best vacation was taking my sister to perform with her cheer/batton group at Disneyland right before Christmas. We were there 3 days and nights. Most of the extended family went, but everyone went with their own immediate family. It was nice to randomly find an aunt and uncle buying souvenirs or finding cousins in line.

    ReplyDelete
  21. With a single Mom we took day trip vacations. No money for real trips but through grants I got to go to summer camp. Some good and some less good memories.

    I have spent the last few years traveling up and down California on most summer weekends with my daughter who is now a college athlete and who had sports competitions throughout middle and high school. Best memories ever. Lots of bonding time.

    ReplyDelete
  22. I've taken a lot of great vacations over the years but the worst we're long road trips that my dad drove. He would never, ever stop at a bathroom even when all give kids were crying to stop. He only stopped when he needed to use the facilities.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Ugh. Travelling with my parents sucked. But we did go to Disney World one year (this was before Epcot even opened!) and that was probably the best.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Weirdest was trip to Ontario in the back of my fathers Saab Sonnet.

    He cracked the hatchback open so we could get air, but my sister and I ended up with CO2 poisoning.

    I became unconscious and my sister was blind for an hour or so....

    Eventually we came to and had KitKats in Parry Sound to celebrate.
    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  25. I will never forget the trip we took from Texas to California when I was just out of the second grade. My sister and I sang California, here I come, over and over and over and my parents thought it was funny. Never told us to shut up. We went to the grocery store before the trip to get Fizzies. If you are too young to remember, they were flavored round tablets that one dropped in water and they would fizz up and you would have a flavored drink. We had a brand new 1957 or 58 red Chevrolet. It was big and beautiful and didn't have air conditioning. OK until we hit the desert. Someone told us to have open containers of dry ice to cool us off. We went to the petrified forest. I remember hitting LA and dying to stay in Tee Pee motel accommodations. My parents were not swayed. We stayed in a motel that was robbed. We were the only guests not robbed in the night because the window got stuck on a nail. We wondered at the beat-nicks that were alien to us. The ocean was magnificent. We still have a vase filled with sea shells we got on that trip. My parents were young and fun and darling.

    A few times we would go to El Paso, Texas, and go across the border to Juarez, Mexico. The locals would reach out to touch my sister's hair and call her rubio. We would always get Mexican jumping beans and found them very entertaining as children. Had races. I think we had fun going there when younger, but the last time we went, it was horrible. Mom and dad got into a really nasty argument. don't know what about. My mother was a machine when it came to shopping, and had a wonderful time, but no one else did, and no one else had any fun. I still hate shopping. Still do.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Best: Jersey Shore...the lovely, boring part that we wnt to very year. Great times down here. Come on, June!!!

    Worst: I have yet to meet a vacation I didn't like...I guess I have been lucky...

    ReplyDelete