Hitting the road....

This coming summer, I am planning to visit Yellowstone, meet up with some old friends and just allow myself to be awed by what we will see.

I have been spending a large amount of time contemplating whether or not to drag the kids along. At 24 and 18, family vacations hold no appeal whatsoever for them. Luckily, I can relate to this.

I think back to the vacations my family enjoyed when I was growing up. My parents, bless their hearts, were never able to provide a trip that didn't include some sort of disaster. Had Mapquest been invented back in the 60's, they would have done well to plan routes that ended not at tourist high points, but at local emergency rooms.

The most memorable vacation happened when I was 17. What were my parents thinking when they rented a Winnebago and loaded all three of us (my brothers being 15 or 16 and 7) into our rolling home and set off to visit relatives in South Carolina?

Being who I was at the time (have I mentioned that I was not a pleasant teenager?), I laid claim to the bed in the back of the camper and warned everyone away from me for the duration of the trip. My parents and brothers carefully avoided contact with me, and I slept, or feigned sleep, the entire journey.

Our first stop - Indianapolis in an ice storm. Said ice caused our wind shield wipers to cease working. Completely. We waited for nearly an entire day in a K Mart parking lot to have them fixed. I don't remember. I slept.

On we went. The Smokey Mountains were, apparently, quite beautiful and majestic. I don't remember. I slept.

We spent one night pulled over in a gas station in the heart of Deliverance land (really, dad, couldn't you have shelled over the few bucks for a campground?), where I couldn't sleep, convinced as I was that it was only a matter of time until several toothless rednecks would arrive to kidnap us and dump our bodies in the far reaches of the Smoky Mountains.

We finally arrived at our Uncle's house in South Carolina. Our cousins, who had emigrated to the South several years before, spoke a completely different language, and entertained us during our visit by opening bottles of Wild Turkey and sitting on the sofa. I think our cousins took us around to several different houses before the Wild Turkey was brought out. Really, why did these people drink so much?

The final leg of our trip included a trip to Myrtle Beach. We got to stay in a real campground. My brother tamed squirrels to pass the time. We walked the beach. I slept.

Only there was news that we didn't know about. Shortly before our beach sojourn, another relative, my aunt who had been watching our German Shepherd, Heidi, phoned my mother to say that Heidi had gotten away and been killed by a car on the road in front of their house.

My mom didn't tell us right away, knowing it would ruin our trip. It did, of course. I went from sleeping to mournfully walking on the beach all day and into the evening.

Finally, we all just wanted to get home. We set off for our long trip and steeled ourselves for the dogless house that would be waiting.

I must digress for a moment. My dad has never been great about filling up the gas tank. Many a vacation was spent hoping we would make it to the next gas station before we ran out of gas. Up until this point, his track record had been good, although the attendant anxiety probably took years off my life.

This time, we were not so lucky. Our giant Winnebago sputtered out of gas on the side of the interstate, about 50 miles from home. For what seemed like hours, no one stopped.

Finally, my dad and brother decided to head off to some nearby houses to call for a tow truck. This was before cell phones, kids. They returned to the camper, cars continuing to whiz past, and we waited for help.

Help arrived in the form of a tow truck driver and a can of gasoline. Even after adding some fuel, my dad had no luck in getting the monstrosity started. Then the tow truck driver decided to pour some gasoline directly on the carbeurator, which was located inside the camper.

Flames instantly shot up. I was aroused from my slumber only to be knocked in the head by the tow truck driver, whose arm was now on fire. I felt my hair and eyebrows beginning to singe and immediately jumped out of the camper. I surprised myself by remembering to STOP, DROP and ROLL. My mom and youngest brother tumbled out after me.

My middle brother, definitely the coolest head in our family, simply walked to the fire extinguisher in the camper, picked it up and put out the tow truck driver.

That simple act earned an admiration that I still feel to this very day.

We finally called some neighbors to pick us up. We trooped home - singed, defeated and sad - and I swore to myself that I would never take a vacation with my family again.

That vacation became the stuff of family mythology, and my kids know the story well. There is nothing about it that will convince them to journey west with us this summer.

Oh well. We are now empty Winnebago-ers.