Journal of Our Journeys
Years ago, I wrote about the family camping trips I went on as a kid. I posted them to my blog, along with scanned, often black and white pictures from those travels. Recently, I dragged out those stories and decided to edit them and slap them into a book. It won't be a book I will promote to the masses or to critical strangers, but a book to share with my family and interested close friends. Or with the innocent followers of my blog.
Over the next twenty Wednesdays, I'll share a chapter a week from the Journal of Our Journeys. And maybe someday, it will be available as a paperback for you to hold in your hands.
Chapter 1 - " The FamilyVacation"
"When I was achild... I thought like a child." 1 Corinthians13:11 (NIV)
Whichis why, when I was a kid, I thought that since my family went on a trip everysummer, everyone else's must have too. I don't know why because none of myfriends ever went on a vacation with their families. My family, however, didtravel somewhere every summer. These family trips were never spectacular, novacations in the south of France or even south of the Border.
My middle-school friend once asked meif Mac, our family mutt, stayed in the hotel with us on vacation. I wasdumbfounded. Hotel? I can count on one hand the number of times I stayed in a motel,hotel, or inn before I was old enough to drop out of college. I must not havebeen a very sharing friend not to have told her about the camper.
Nope, we never stayed in motels oreven resort cabins. We slept, ate, and played cribbage in Dad's pickup camper.Along with the faithful dog.
It was a simpler time.People didn't have to jump on a plane and travel halfway around the world tosee new and different things. Growing up in the sixties and seventies in therural upper Midwest, it took very little actually to get us excited. Everythingwas new and different for my sister Pat and me. Everything was an adventure forus. And everywhere we went, our eyes bugged out in wonder and awe. And ourlungs filled with laughter.
I could never imagine havinghad a childhood like the kids today. Where it is go, go, go, all the time,non-stop. A barrage of internet images, high-speed everything, informationoverload, and your favorite song is always available on YouTube. A cell phonein everyone's hand, a finger or thumb scrolling up or tap, tap, tapping in anattempt to get more points than Rusty McNutts, who you assume is anothertwelve-year-old but is actually a forty-year-old creeper.
And it never stops, even on vacation.While riding down the road, today’s kids watch cartoons on the TV screen in theback seat of the family mini-van, instead of absorbing all the marvels passingthem by on the side of the road.
Mine is the lastgeneration to live through that simpler time. We didn't know anything. Wedidn't get carpal tunnel or tech-neck. We ate SpaghettiOs for supper andWheaties for breakfast. We didn't play team sports; we played dodgeball andtetherball at recess unless there was snow, and then we had snowball fights.And that's the way it was.
All those memories froman uncomplicated youth. It was a time when it was all right to spend time withjust Mom, Dad, your sister, and, of course, the dog.
As if I had a choice.
