FA M I LY
ON VACATIONS Instilling the family value of travel. BY J E N N I F E R A S H TO N RYA N
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his summer my husband and I are driving with our three young children from L.A. to Durango, Colorado. Cue the anticipatory anxiety! How many Water Wow coloring books equal the survival rate for 12 hours in a Honda Odyssey? Which will break us first, the third-grader’s shrill cries of boredom or actual crying by the 3-year-old? To push through the work of packing and panic spending (organic lollipops, water shoes, Etch A Sketch), I recall a nostalgic reel of childhood vacation memories. I yell to my husband in the other room that I’m finally ordering the $349 Tundra 65 Yeti cooler. I need it to store the salami-and-cheese sandwiches, just like my mom used to make for car trips. With one and then two kids, my husband and I flew several times a year. But on our budget, having the third was the nail in our minivan coffin. The sentencing is familiar; for years, my parents each drove a minivan. I remember in my
Looking back, what defined and shaped a lot of who I became are the odd, wonderful experiences I had on vacations. late elementary and junior high years, well before the invention of iPads, and even Yeti, loading up our Toyota with a red Igloo cooler of homemade snacks to drive from my hometown of Sacramento to Bluff, Utah, population 250. We didn’t know anyone there, except the owners of a humble motel called Recapture Lodge. 20 PA S A D E N A
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I pull up Recapture’s website and look at the photos online to remember the wood-paneled rooms and beds in blue coverlets. Nothing’s changed. Old, heavy TVs sit in the same bulky cabinets. From what I recall of 1993, I can picture the oilcloth-covered table in the rec room and the squiggly lines of the topographic maps that we pored over with owners Jim and Luanne Hook to plan our hiking route. I remember that Jim looked over at me with his pinkie finger in his nose. He must be touching his brain! I thought. It was jammed up all the way to the second knuckle. Seeing my widening eyes, he laughed and reached over to show me his hand, revealing the stub—a long-ago casualty. My dad and Jim still exchange Christmas cards, but it wasn’t Jim’s charisma that got us to Bluff. The Hooks kept a pack of llamas that guests like us could take out on multiday backpacking trips. For school breaks, a lot of my friends growing up flew to their grandparents’ time-shares in Hawaii. Some visited Disneyland or the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Mataya went to L.A. to visit her cousins and Zach went to San Diego and said he touched a real dolphin. No one else had been to Bluff. My father, a physician and landscape photographer, who in his “retirement” works with Doctors Without Borders, dedicated our time off to minivan adventures in all sorts of places my friends hadn’t heard of. This time we’d go even more remote than Bluff: into the permit-only Grand Gulch, a winding canyon known for well-preserved Anasazi ruins and cliff art. From the maps,
