Earlier this month, my family’s vacations plans were officially buried underneath a mounting stack of gas station receipts.
We had planned a family road trip to Minneapolis for a week of shopping and seeing lakes and whatever else people in Minnesota do between ice melting and a swarm of Republicans descending on their community. I assume buy bug spray.
There were more than a few reasons to cancel our plans and instead settle on battling tourists for our own rock in a mountain getaway. Twelve hours in a car with a pregnant woman with a bladder the size of a peanut is a recipe for disaster and a smelly one at that, because I won’t lose time for restroom breaks.
But the knowledge that gas prices would likely be hovering around $4 a gallon by Memorial Day weekend loomed large in our minds. Gas never used to be the deciding factor in a family trip. It used to be finding a hotel or campground, picking out which annoying relatives you were going to visit and the maximum round-trip mileage before your mother officially lost her mind and started shouting to passing motorists, “Kill me, kill me now!” We nearly made it from the garage to the state line with my mom … we were good kids.
For me it was how long I could go before weaving through the Black Hills and the thoughts of that greasy bear claw I had for breakfast would cause me to vomit all over my sister.
It was two hours and my sister hasn’t talked to me in more than a year.
Isn’t it a little bit ironic that, in a country renowned for its freedom and the ability to hopscotch from state to state, we are now held hostage by gas prices? Vacations are only half of it. Most people worry about how they can even get to work or take the kids to soccer practice, let alone crisscross through this beautiful country with a backseat of screaming rug rats.
The only thing I find more ironic is that no one has any control over gas prices. They peak at the height of the summer travel season and they return to a normal (cough, cough) number just in time for us to devote our money to buy Christmas presents. I guess I never question whether the seasons will change, so why would I question this.
But it’s sad. Between cell phones and laptop computers, the family vacation was already becoming an anomaly. We’re too busy to stop working, so we plan a vacation. We never really disconnect from work – still checking the e-mail and answering the office memos.
Now we have other excuses to not take that time away from work and not have that quality time.
Sure, air travel is an option, though they’re not exactly immune from fuel prices either. But gazing out a window looking at clouds from 36,000 feet isn’t the same as staring at the bleakness of the Nebraska farmland and trying to understand why people live there.
I want my kids to at least once hear me threaten, “to turn this car around” and my wife to kiss the dining room floor like a freed hostage and declare, “We will never go on another trip again.” We’re losing those memories.
And in the end, that’s going to cost us a lot more than gas.
