Vacation survival strategies

By Karen Stiller



Almost every family vacation, if we were to be honest, has a not-going-as-planned moment, when our dreamy expectations crash head-on into hard reality. My most recent happened last summer flying between Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso — where we had to grease the palm of an airport employee to clean up after my poor son who picked up a truly awful virus — and Accra, Ghana, where I spent seven hours playing rummy with my three kids in an airport waiting lounge.

Tired, grumpy and dusty, my inner Clark Griswold (that National Lampoon’s Vacation movie guy who has such high hopes) was defeated. I experienced the exact same feeling just outside Sussex, N.B., when I wanted to run weeping from the family van and the relentlessness of I-Spy.

Susan Shaw, professor and chair of the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo, is reassuring. She has just completed a study on the reality — and the fantasy — of family vacations. “Every parent we talked to could easily identify a part of a holiday that was terrible,” says Shaw. “We have an ideal of togetherness; that we’ll get along well and get away from the stresses of home; that we can heal and interact and that this will last a lifetime.” As for the kids, says Shaw, they just want to have fun. So, before you start dreaming up your family summer vacation — and ratcheting up your expectations — here’s some input from Shaw and other experts (parents and grandparents just like you).

Be realistic

Shaw believes that families today are busy, stressed and hard-working, and feel “pressure to make vacations count.” Shaw’s research shows that a “desire to create memories of family as a collective” is a driving, almost urgent, force in how families plan and execute vacations. “A feeling that it’s very difficult to have that time adds to the pressure to make it really great. Often it does work, but sometimes there are difficulties,” says Shaw. “Things like travel and driving, wanting everyone to be happy all the time, which won’t happen, different kinds of kids and personalities, and high expectations that don’t always work.” Shaw’s research suggests that things might go better if parents “focus on the good things and expect that it’s not all going to be perfect.”

As one father reported in Shaw’s research paper, “It was good to put the four of us together in one room for 12 days and discover, yeah, we can live together for 12 days without killing each other.” (There’s looking at the sunny side!) As you plan, remember that Shaw’s research shows that kids are in it for the fun, and they can pretty much have fun anywhere. Kids reported that they liked the freedom of living outside the confinement of a tight schedule, so think twice about over-programming.

But do plan

Few of us will match the planning acumen of Mary-Lou Harrison of Brooklyn, Ont., a mother of two who grew up attending Windermere United in Toronto. Harrison has brought her civil servant background into family vacation planning in the form of a briefing binder she prepares for every trip the family goes on. “It may seem obsessive and compulsive, and it may be,” says Harrison. But it has helped her family plan as a unit and not miss out on great stuff during their journeys, both near and far.

“I put all the tourist info from the places we are going, my Internet research, attractions, festivals, museums and restaurants all into a binder.” Harrison writes an itinerary based on their timetable and everyone’s interests. “Each day we were travelling through a community, I would know what was happening. We were in Halifax on Canada Day, I knew where the festivities were,” explains Harrison.

Even though the family of four may have a ton of information on hand, they still pick and choose. “Don’t put too much into one day,” advises Harrison. “Be really present to the things you choose to do. And allow everybody some input. Sometimes we literally take a vote. So, set a plan, and then prepare to be flexible. You might, after all, discover something that is not in the briefing binder.”

Be open

Jayne Little, who attends Wesley United in Cambridge, Ont., did not have “pat a beluga whale” written on a to-do list for their family vacation. But empty space and time sitting around a picnic table in Newfoundland resulted in her two boys, now 18 and 14, getting to do just that. “That would not have happened if we had been over-programmed. We had a lot of down time.” The Littles also decided to fly to Newfoundland instead of driving in order to maximize their time on the island. “When you’ve only got two weeks, think about how you are using it.”

Little is also willing to give up a day of official vacation time that could be spent on the road, and just spend it at home preparing her mind and heart (not the car) for the vacation. Some people might think that was a waste of a day, but Little says it was a deliberate strategy “so I wasn’t coming home stressed, it was to prep my mind.”

Little also changed how she viewed her own house during the summer months. “We’d put our house into cottage mode in the summer. When you go to the cottage, you ignore things a little bit more, you say, ‘Oh, the sandals can be kicked there.’ You are recognizing that even if you’re not going away on a holiday, you can bring that mood into the house in the summer a little.”

Be considerate of each other

Rev. Karen Boivin is the minister of Maxville-Moose Creek (Ont.) United. Her kids are now 17 and 15, but were once, of course, younger and in need of being chased around picnic tables by their mother on rest stops. “When we did these 26-hour drives to Florida, every rest stop we would run around every picnic table to get some exercise” and burn off kid-energy. The Boivins would assign a bench seat in their vehicle to each child and let them do their own thing, which sometimes meant watching the TV/VCR combo that was fastened to the floor of the vehicle with bungee cords.

As their kids got older, the Boivins allowed them to invite friends to come along, as teens tend to insist must happen if they are to go at all. “The two boys refused to sleep together, so they got the rooms with the double bunks, my daughter and her friend got a double bed, and my husband and I got the floor in the living room. The things you’re willing to do. . . .”

Most family vacationers are willing to do just about anything to minimize the tensions that can arise when people who love each other are suddenly in each other’s back pockets 24/7. Jayne Little still remembers her own father stopping the car during family vacations and walking away to go find some adults to talk to. “My mom said it wasn’t rude; he needed that space.” Little suggests it is an act of love and family harmony to recognize what your partner needs and to honour it. Over the years, attending family camp at Five Oaks near Paris, Ont. (one of four United Church retreat centres across the country), has provided a great way for the family to grow together, and still do things separately, during summer vacation.

One year later, after that fateful night flight over Africa, we are ready (almost) to laugh about that phase of our trip. What we remember most about that amazing vacation — and all the more ordinary ones we take every other summer — are the things that didn’t go as planned, the unexpected moments of things going really right and things going really wrong, that make up part of our family’s history together. And that really is the point of summer vacation.