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Turtle Tales
by Carol Breidenbach
Fond Memories of Family Vacations
31 July 2001
The summer between our oldest daughter Angela's junior and senior year of high school we decided to take what we thought would be our last family vacation together. We opted for Niagara Falls, a place of interest to the whole family.
Every time we would get ready to leave on a vacation or camping trip we had the same routine. Everyone would pile everything that they wanted to take on the trip on the front porch. It was left to my husband Lenny to pack it all into whatever vehicles we were taking.
Many times, that mountain of perceived necessities looked bigger than our method of transportation. Lenny never failed to make it all fit and to pack it in the order that it would be needed. My daughter Angela said that she always admired that talent in her father and is grateful that her husband Robert is gifted with the same skill.
We look back now with humor at an incident that started that trip to Niagara Falls. Just as we were ready to pull out of the driveway, we discovered youngest daughter Lisa didn’t have her pillow. In his usual gentle way, Lenny told her to get the pillow, as she would need it for napping on the way. Lisa insisted she wasn’t going to need it. Upon Dad’s insistence, she exited the card and came back with it.
Lisa was an extremely short person for her age, but she could always make up for her size with her gift of wit and words. Before climbing into the car she announced, “Dad, since you made me go and get this pillow that I don’t need, when we get to Niagara Falls, I am going to refuse to look at it. Oh yes, (pointing dramatically) over there will be the whole family lined up looking at Niagara Falls and I will be over here with my back turned to the falls!”
Feeling 10 feet tall, she climbed into that car full of pride and under the assumption she was now the winner of the pillow episode. We were left to wonder how the rest of the trip was going to go. When we arrived, she forgot the pillow incident and did look at the falls and had a really wonderful time.
A bittersweet vacation memory we have is the camping trip we took the summer our son Jerome died. He was killed in an accident the end of June. Earlier in the summer we had made reservations to rent a camper and stay at Old Man’s Cave in southern Ohio in mid-August. I really didn’t feel like following through with our plans and wanted to cancel the trip. My husband felt that it was important for our other children that we take them on that trip and continue to build good family memories.
He said that he would get the camper ready to go if I would go into town and get all the groceries we would need. I was still pretty much in a comatose state, but thought I could handle that task. I took our son Chip along. He was about 11-years-old at the time. When we got in the grocery store, I gave him a cart and told him that he should go around and pick up all the snack food that he and the girls would like on the trip. I took another cart to get all the real food and agreed to meet him at the check-out. When we met again, he had a cart pile high with snacks and junk food! Unable to deal with it, I checked it all out and we headed for home.
When we got home, he jumped out of the car yelling to his sisters, “Mom let me buy all the snack food and you are never going to believe what we have!” Well, they ate every bit of that stuff Chip bought, but we did have some regular food left. That is our favorite family memory now and I so grateful for my husband’s gentle insistence that we go on that vacation. We don’t look very happy in some of the pictures taken around Old Man’s Cave, but it was the beginning of our healing process. We could go on and we would be happy again.
I feel very blessed because that trip we took to Niagara Falls turns out not to be our very last family vacation. This summer we are renting a beach house in the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the whole family is staying for a week. Our family is larger now having added a son-in-law, daughter-in-law and grandson.
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