My love of travel came from both parents. When we were young – before our first visit to Guatemala – we would take cross country road trips in our full size van, sometimes with a mattress replacing the backmost bench. We varied between camping (Dad had been a Boy Scouts troop leader and had appropriate gear), staying with friends (Mom’s ex-boyfriend in Nebraska got us tickets to the University of Miami’s first national championship win at the 1984 Orange Bowl game), and sometimes driving through the night. If we woke up to find the van parked at a Waffle House, and no sign of our parents, we knew we were allowed to find them inside and get some hot chocolate.
With our summers allocated to Guatemala, and then shifting to school there, our road trip habit declined. We did one big road trip there during middle school, hiring a large van and its driver to take us from Antigua to Tikal. In addition to the four of us, our housekeeper and several family members came along, including his elderly mother. The morning of our departure, the driver arrived on time, only to leave again immediately, having secured permission to bring his wife and children along as well. (For clarity, we did not have a phone at the time.) As we arrived in Petén, most of us had to disembark from the van because of the muddy road (in dry season); on the return trip, everyone except the driver disembarked. This was the only time I have camped at Tikal, and we were really roughing it, relying on the dry season to allow us to sleep on the ground rather than in a tent. While there were bathrooms for campers, they were locked overnight. Yikes! By the next time I visited Tikal, right after college, the stairs on Temple 1 (Templo El Gran Jaguar) had degraded enough that it was off limits for climbing.
My next big road trip with my parents was in college, on my way to study at the University of Glasgow for a year. We started, as with most trips in the UK, by staying near London, arriving in time to celebrate my aunt and uncle’s 40th anniversary, where I heard the story of Dad accidentally locking himself out of their house, which he was watching for them, when he dropped them at the airport for their honeymoon. Dad was a climber – mountain and rock – and realized there was an open window on the second floor, so he climbed up and let himself back in.
We spent about three weeks visiting family and friends, with the occasional unscheduled stay along the way, arriving into a town and immediately visiting tourist information (typically at the train or bus station) to find a suitable bed & breakfast. In one such place, the bed & breakfast was a large manor house attached to a farm, and the owner showed Dad some coins he had recently dug up, which Dad identified as likely being from the Charles II era. They then referred us to a pub for dinner which was even farther outside of town than the B&B and turned out to be amazing.
I suspect that Dad would have appreciate the digital navigation options we have now. They certainly would have been better than Mom’s style of navigation: “You were supposed to turn back there!” That resulted in the harrowing experience of Dad backing up on a roundabout. On two different occasions. Please, don’t ever do that. Go around.
The last time they visited us here was supposed to involve a short road trip to the Wisconsin Dells. Their visit was scheduled to coincide with my planned black belt test… which got pushed out a week right after my parents booked their flights, both to here and onto Europe for one of their many cruises. (My black belt test then got delayed by six months due to a car accident.) Given the weekend in town instead of in Wisconsin, I booked tickets to see Million Dollar Quartet again at the Paramount, figuring the music from that era would resonate nicely for my parents. (It did!)