50 years of family traveling

Traveling with children has never been easy. Always it has demanded imagination, patience and flexibility.
Luggage, blankets and pillows became beds with my mom’s creative determination to tend and entertain her five young children in our family station wagon while Dad drove us from the tree covered hills of New York to the cactus covered desert of Arizona. To keep us from poking and fighting our way across Texas, Mom started us playing the alphabet game, games of I Spy or counting vehicles. If we still descended into wrangling with each other she prompted us to join her in singing Sunday School songs until miles of music wore away our tension.
Black and white pictures of that first of many trips capture us in a small playground eating a picnic lunch of baloney sandwiches. We went West. We looked around and quickly headed back to the family homestead. We settled down in the big house in the little village.
Less than two years later we made the same journey, but this time we five no longer fit on beds of luggage. We could still put down the seats and sit with outstretched legs as we leaned against the luggage and played the games, sang and read. This time our trip overlapped Thanksgiving day celebrations. For that one meal, we ate in a restaurant. I don’t remember what it was except that it was not turkey; the proprietor had sold out of his holiday dinners. Again we only stayed away from grandparents for a couple weeks. Back home, Dad bought a 400-acre dairy farm where we lived and worked for five years.
By the time Dad felt the pull to again seek a life among the cacti, he had teenagers filling the station wagon. We knew the drill: Read, write, see who could collect the most variety of state license plates or play the alphabet game backwards. When it was time to eat, one of the girls would climb into the back by the food chest to make up sandwiches and hand out cups of Kool-Aid or juice from the two-gallon thermos. That time we stayed in Arizona, rented a house and finished out the school year before heading East again.
Two years later, we repeated the drive, cramming seven tall bodies into an overloaded station wagon with everything we might need after we found a place to stay. No safety belts, no air conditioning and no fighting allowed. Although my older brother could now drive, mostly we wrote letters and post cards to family and friends or we rolled down the windows and read books until we dozed off.
By the time I traveled with my children, we buckled up for short drives, but when the hours piled up, I let crying babies play on the floor, balance against the seat or pat the window as I held them. I read a lot of books out loud to my children and husband to while away the miles.
We might stop for a picnic lunch, but mostly I exhibited my well-honed skill of balancing mayo on a knife as the car veered around a corner and up a hill.
Safety belts and shoulder straps increased in subsequent cars, but on our longest trip, my grade-school aged daughter made a small play room for herself on top of the suitcases. Busy playing in her nest, she never noticed the majestic scenery outside her window. With one of the seats taken out, her brothers took turns laying on the floor where they read comic books and magazines by the hour. We made many stops at fast food joints and tried out local specialties at restaurants.
Seven years later my son drove up from New Orleans with his newborn strapped in a bucket car seat. He insisted that the child had to stay buckled up, that it was not safe for a baby to ride otherwise. It was, however, fine for the adults to move around seeking ways to distract and entertain the baby.
Subsequent grandchildren have made their own protests, wiggled out of safety seats and slid down to the floor, but as the years have increased the safety devices, the seat belts stay buckled and electronic games and in-car movies have replaced the games, books, songs and writing. Cellophane wrapped packages of cookies, crackers and juice boxes suffice for a while, but after sitting upright for hours, everyone eagerly unbuckles to escape the road noise and enjoy the play ground at the fast food place.
That remains the one constant to car trips through the years – the relief and pleasure when we finally stop and put our feet on solid earth again.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org)