She’d been terrified the whole time, but Ike had kept saying it wasn’t an adventure if it wasn’t at least a little unpleasant, their motto when things went spectacularly wrong. Things were always going spectacularly wrong when they traveled—injuries and storms and lost reservations—but somehow the disastrous trips were always the ones they remembered as being the most fun.
“It’s not an adventure if it’s not as least a little unpleasant” is my family’s motto, which originated during a semi-disastrous trip to Washington, D.C. when my kids were young and we got caught in the rain and ended up soaked. So many of my fondest travel memories are marked by this kind of minor disaster—someone ran a fever, someone cried in the car the whole way home. And yet, those memories are often our fondest, when we have enough distance to see through the discomfort to everything else that came with it.
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