One granola lover says it’s sleeping outdoors in a screened contraption furnished with a bug zapper and cooking everything over pieces of charred wood. For another, it’s a week on Disney’s Big Red Boat (shared by 500 hyperactive youngsters). For my parents, it’s a floating buffet (a cruise) with reserved seating, plus breakfast brought to your cabin door ... all accompanied by nonstop steel drum music wafting through the air.
You see the rub? What is the perfect vacation for one is the definition of a living hell for another.
For me, well, forget it. Why speak of something that hasn't happened, might never happen, and ain’t gonna happen unless I hit the Big Numbers jackpot. Until that day, I’m part of the vacation en familia. This year, it’s again going to be three generations 40 feet from a pristine lake in New Hampshire with sagging mattresses that are holdovers from the Lewis & Clark expedition.
A major drawback of these intergenerational vacations is that they feature a lot of pressure.
One pressure is the food pushing. Always fearful that we’ll be stranded more than 10 miles from a supermarket, my mother—the food pusher—overloads the hearse-size trunk of her Lincoln Town Car with groceries.
Last year she packed in 44 cans of diet soda, 30 frozen sirloins, 5 packs of hot dogs, 6 boxes of bran flakes, 9 boxes of spaghetti and warehouse-sized jars of spaghetti sauce, plus enough bagels to feed the entire deployment of New Hampshire’s state troopers.
Unpacking this chattel is almost an all-day job. While others are frolicking in the beautiful water just steps from the sliding doors of our kitchen, we’re all unpacking a cache that could fortify the troops.
Watching all this food being unpacked, I get panicky. You see, these 30 frozen sirloins will soon be turned into meals—meals I’m supposed to eat. Forever calorie counting, I’ll now get sucked into daily three-course cholesterol-clogging breakfasts, extravagant lunches, and dinner buffets that rival Carnival Cruise’s 40-foot-long table.
It’s not just that the food gets made—it’s that if you don’t eat it, you’re in the doghouse: “What da ya mean you don’t want homefries? Aren't you gonna eat the hot sausage? Want a piece of strawberry pie? What, no lunch?”
The other pressure is when to sleep and rise each morning. No one’s sleep cycle is ever synchronized, and with paper-thin walls and one bathroom, the sounds of silence include a perpetually brewing coffee pot gurgling through its cycle, and a toilet that never stops flushing. My father, who likes to wake the birds, starts the caffeine procession at a cool 4 a.m.
There is also the pressure of the games pushers. My nieces travel with the entire board game aisle from Toys “R” Us—enough to fill the Milton Bradley warehouse. Because this vacation is about “all things family” and watching less television, a seemingly never-ending game of Monopoly has been set up on what used to be the dining table. Every time I walk past, the youngest chirps, “You wanna play, Auntie?”
As I staggered to bed the other night (my eyes pried open with toothpicks), the oldest catapults into my bedroom flashing a set of cards.
“Old Maid? You in?”
I groan and cover my head with pillows.
Early next morning, I tiptoe into the cherubs’ bedroom while they’re fast asleep and find one with a pair of dice dangling from her clenched fist, and the other with a scorecard wedged between her cheeks and the pillow. Pressure. Don’t you love vacations?
Humorist and freelance scribe Joyce Faiola is a consultant/designer for the hospitality industry and lives in New England. Her Email is JLFaiola@Juno.com
