2008 Woodie Awards
HUMOR: On the road to vacation
Daniel Walters, Opinions EditorThe intended demographic for this column, as you might guess, is 17 to 24-year-olds who enjoy obscure allusions to 19th-century literature and less obscure allusions to poop. My advertisers, however, pressure me to cater more to the demographic with the greatest amount of disposable income: 35-year-old married couples with two or three young kids in tow.
It is with this in mind that The Varnished Truth, in conjunction with Procter & Gamble and the Foundation for Ripping Off Chevy Chase, presents: The 2007 Whitworthian Guide to Family Vacations.
The first step to a successful family vacation is to have a family. If you don't have time for the usual nine-month mandatory waiting period, you can always use the Angelina Jolie loophole and pick up some children at the corner drugstore on the way home from work.
The second step is to figure out why you would ever want to leave Spokane. (I doubt Europe's metal garbage-eating goat statues can compare to Spokane's.)
If you said the purpose of your family vacation is to "relax" or "bring your family closer together," then you either have an incredible naivety or a wicked sense of sarcasm. The only purpose a family vacation can possibly serve is to test the strength of your family's love. When your child grows up and writes a best-selling memoir about his tortured childhood, he'll have you to thank.
Destination: Obviously, college students can choose, on a whim, to take a seven month excursion across the Atlantic for the express purpose of drinking furthering their education. A couple bringing three children as carry-ons, however, has no such luxury. Instead of heading to exotic places like "the moon" or "the center of the Earth" or "inside the human body," they vacation somewhere a little closer, like the Walgreens parking lot. When I was a kid, I was given a choice of going to Walla or Walla or some combination of the two.
Age of the child: It's always tricky to figure out which age to take a child on his first family vacation. Too early and your child becomes a burden, what with having to feed him through an umbilical cord and everything. Too late and your child spends the entire vacation complaining about how the stupid family vacation took him away from his loud music and promiscuity and illicit drugs.
But if the age is just young enough, then every road is yellow brick, and every ride is as wild as Mr. Toad's. I approached my first vacations with childlike wonder.
"Wow! This is the bestest place ever! I want to live here forever and ever and ever!"
"Yes, Daniel," my parents agreed. "This is pretty neat. And this is just the first of many, many similar roadside restrooms on this trip."
I even idealized the countless historical markers that littered the roadside. I imagined they said something awesome like, "On this site, a long time ago, Abraham Lincoln and King Tut donned robot suits and fought to the death," or maybe "This is the burial site of God."
Sadly, once I finally convinced my parents to pull over and look at one of the markers, it said something like "On May 16, 1847, fur trapper Euwell Devoux spat out a mouthful of chewing tobacco on this very spot."
Transportation: Some social scientists postulate we have entered an "Age of Aviation," where it is possible for a massive mechanical flying machine called an "aero-plane" to transport us thousands of leagues over the ocean, far above the clutches of Poseidon and his sea monster minions. Still, despite statistical evidence for its safety, many vacationers choose not to fly, fearing they will be shot down by the Red Baron. This irrational fear is probably a consequence of the way the sensationalistic American media exaggerates the Red Baron threat to get higher ratings.
Many families instead choose a more iconic form of transportation: The Vacation Minivan. The Vacation Minivan features, along with cupholders, magical properties that bend space and time. At the beginning of the trip, the van starts out fairly spacious. But with each mile that scrolls up on the odometer, the space inside shrinks faster than a Death Star trash compactor (with an old bagel under the car seat filling the tentacled dianoga monster role).
After a thousand miles, most families are found dead, suffocated by the pillows, old newspapers, and empty Cheese Nips boxes in the cubic foot of space remaining. It's a psychological pressure cooker. The paranoia and sibling accusations fly: "Daaaad… he's blinking at me!" "She's thinking a dirty word!" "He won't stop humming the hit '80s rock song 'Final Countdown'!" "WHERE'S MY BAGEL!?" Nothing causes madness to come a-rappin' at your chamber door quite like being cooped up in the Vacation Minivan.
Except, perhaps, as Stanley Kubrick might argue, being cooped up in the hotel room.
Lodging: Let's examine the landmark 2000 Vacation Court case of Dad v. Mom. My Dad wanted to stay at the EconoLodge, because it clearly had the word "Econo" in its name. My Mom did not wish to stay at the EconoLodge, because while she cared about finances, she also cared about not having to room with cockroaches the size and general appearance of Steve Buscemi.
Dad tried to gently explain that the "Seedy Motel Room" - with the bedbugs and splotchy sheets and occasional elevator fires - is a quintessential part of the American experience.
"So is a divorce," Mom retorted.
"Dibs on two of the three kids, then," Dad said.
"Last person to say 'not it' gets Daniel," Mom said. "NOT IT!"
As a child, I felt helpless to stop such arguments. All my life I had trained to create conflict, not diminish it.
So instead of going all peer mediation on them, I simply listened to them fight, and memorized the colorful words and phrases they used in case I got angry in the future.
Vacations, you see, were about learning. Learning to sit in a car for 11 hours straight, without getting kidney damage. Learning to truly appreciate your Game Boy. And learning, that no matter how far you go or what horrible accents you discover, when you return the metal garbage-eating goat will always be waiting.
Daniel Walters is the opinions editor and a senior majoring in communications and history. Contact him at daniel.walters@whitworthian.com.
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