9 minute read
FAMILY
ON VACATIONS
Instilling the family value of travel.
BY JENNIFER ASHTON RYAN
This 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 rst, 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 nally 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 ew several times a year. But on our budget, having the third was the nail in our minivan cof n. The sentencing is familiar; for years, my parents each drove a minivan. I remember in my
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.
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 nger 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 ew 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,
we knew the entrance points and exits from the canyon. It was a high water year with frequent ash- ood warnings. No one had cell phones. We loaded the pickup, hitched on the llama trailer, and took the highway to a long dirt road through the red desert.
Hiking with llamas wasn’t only quirky, but also practical for our family, since my dad traveled with a signi cant amount of bulky camera gear. The genius was that instead of wearing a heavy backpack stuffed with food and clothes, we carried only a lead rope. And by making friends with a llama, we were distracted from the drudgery of walking for miles in the dusty canyon. Dalton, who had a white chest and dark patches around his eyes and nose, followed me slow and steady. My sister’s llama, Hershey, solid dark brown, was more jumpy. No, he didn’t spit. You’re thinking of a camel.
But before we got to know those two, my sister and I were in the front seat of the pickup with Jim, bumping down a long, at dirt road. We drove up to a deep divot in the ground and Jim stopped the car. The road dipped into the steep, sandy side of the hill and right back out. But we could no longer see the road. The pit was lled to the brim with tumbleweed. All day we’d seen them rolling by and hadn’t given a thought to where they’d end up. This wasn’t a little gully with a dozen tumbleweeds that Jim and my dad could toss up and out of our way. A few buses could t down in this crevasse, now containing a critical mass of straw weeds like a jar of spiky jellybeans. Jim stopped the car and got out to talk to my dad and mom, who were tailing us in the minivan.
They talked for a long time as my sister and I sat wide eyed, no idea what would happen next. Then Jim climbed back in the cab, rolled the windows up, and told us to hold on to our hats. We looked at each other and back at the llamas as the truck started driving forward. We were going in.
Slowly and con dently, like a pachyderm entering a swimming hole, Jim drove us into the tumbleweeds like they weren’t even there. The brittle material crunched from the impact, ghting us off by con scating all visibility. We became completely enveloped in tumbleweeds as they overtook the windshield and both the driver and passenger windows. Us little girls just giggled incessantly, heads turned back, eyes xed on the llamas as we watched them become swallowed up like us. The truck engine was loud alongside the competing volume of the scratching and crunching of the weeds. Our mission shifted into slow motion at the bottom of the gully, for surely we would become stuck, forever separated from our parents and buried alive. We still couldn’t see anything; we just listened to that roar, and it was hard to tell whether we were making forward progress. Jim gunned the gas to push through the density at the bottom of the pile. We screamed and laughed nervously, and somehow, miraculously, the sun reappeared, we saw the horizon, and it became clear that we’d reached the other side.
On vacation it happens like this, unplanned moments you always remember, and ones (long, whiny drives) you can quickly forget. For my parents’ efforts packing, nding these rare sights, securing permits, packing the cooler, we saw it all: sandstone waves like orange taffy, giant redwoods, green hilltops dotted with twisted live oaks, slot canyons, and class IV river rapids. My sister and I cartwheeled among wild owers and clambered up rock piles while dad stood underneath a white sheet peering into his 4x5 view camera.
There were plenty of times when I just wanted to t in and take “normal” trips. But looking back, what de ned and shaped a lot of who I became are the odd, wonderful experiences I had on vacations. For some families it’s around the dinner table, or the baseball field. For us, in between the irregular, around-the-clock schedule of an emergency room physician, we had our time together on vacations. My parents set a budget and an interest point, carved out time, and we went. Now I enjoy the thrill of doing the same.
SUMMER IS FOR …
READING GOOD BOOKS
> Launched in March, Pasadena’s Brownish Books sends by mail beautifully wrapped children’s books that feature black and brown characters. Owner Shakira Johnson curates each bundle by its recipient’s age and interests, welcoming special requests and specific details about who the books are for. “I look for books where children can see positive images of themselves as the main characters,” she says. “The stories and illustrations should inspire them to dream big and have confidence.” Johnson avoids titles that promote racial stereotypes or represent characters in culturally inauthentic ways. Instead, she works with local authors and often finds new titles by word of mouth. Johnson walked into the conversation of racial diversity in children’s literature naturally, when building a home library for her two young boys. She’s now the go-to expert. Bundles from $50/2–3 books; brownish
books.com —JENNIFER ASHTON RYAN
SPLISH SPLASH
> Like its name, local company Funboy will make you smile: It’s perfected the art of making silly, sustainable blowup pool floats. One of its newest designs is a giant Saved by the Bell meets Honey I Shrunk the Kids ’90s cell phone. Also launched this year, the Malibu Barbie line includes floats shaped like a private jet and a vintage pink convertible. For younger ones, you can order smaller cars and planes with shade covers and bright-yellow steering wheels as part of the new Funbaby line of blowups for infants. Chic patterns like tie-dye and Moroccan tiles adorn inflatable kiddie pools. Barbie will surely make a splash in the hot pink heart pool design. From $49; funboy.com —J.A.R.
AFTERNOON NAPS
> Muslin blankets by the mom-owned Easy Sunday Club aren’t the gauzy swaddles stacked in every baby store. Instead of a simple repeat pattern, these four-layer throws feature watercolor artworks painted by owner Cathy Zhang. “Each has an educational component,” she says. “The Alphabet Blanket features 26 animals with names beginning from A to Z, including ‘quokka’ and ‘X-ray fish.’” Zhang’s own children use the blankets to snuggle during naptime and as playmats on the floor. Using wooden alphabet blocks, she taught her 2-yearold to place her toy letters on the blanket’s corresponding animals. Zhang herself learned to watercolor as stress relief after long days working a draining, unfulfilling o ce job. Five years ago, when she moved to L.A. from Portland, she pivoted and launched a business to feature her paintings. $60; —J.A.R.
LAARTSHOW.COM
