Sounds odd, I know, but once you’ve visited Disney’s various themed experiences, been to a dude ranch, or seen the “island” Royal Caribbean built to replicate a real tropical island, you might think Baudrillard is on to something. This is a counterpoint to what Orvar Löfgren calls the stance of the “anti-tourist” and the obsession with locating “authentic” experience, or that of the “post-tourist” who has given up trying to find new and authentic experiences, and has joined in with the throng going to Disneyland, knowing it’s fake but taking their fun with a heavy dose of irony. There is no such thing as inauthentic experience for the post-tourist, because even an encounter with an utterly fabricated site—a fake island, say, or Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson tree house (a fake of a fake, since it was a fictional experience and the “tree” holding the tree house is made of steel, concrete, and stucco)—will nevertheless yield insights into contemporary culture.
Authenticity comes up again and again in travel and leisure literature, but what, precisely, do we understand by the word authenticity, anyway, as it relates to our travel experience? There’s no easy answer for that, and much depends on what you’re looking for in the first place. We all know that a “tourist trap” is something contrived and manufactured and best avoided, but what if we are looking for tourist traps? What if we like tourist traps? Don’t we then want to find the most authentic tourist trap? Of course, there are times when even being sure of what you want won’t help you find it, given that much of today’s marketing is not just manipulative or misleading (we expect that) but blatantly fraudulent. Recently in both Spain and my home province of Alberta tourism marketing bodies were found to be using photos of exotic locations to stand in for home base. Alberta used a beach in Northumberland, England, of all places, to represent Alberta’s natural beauty; Spain used a photo of a deserted Bahamas beach to stand in for its crowded Costa Brava.
So the question What does it mean for a family to go on vacation? is certainly not as simple as it might first appear. We want our children, and ourselves as parents, to have as much access as possible to what we view as authentic, real, genuine experiences and places, however we define that, though we also want our children to gradually be exposed to the world’s complexity, part of which is undeniably the way in which our leisure is manipulated by corporate interests. We want our children to touch and know the world as it is, but we also want to keep them physically safe and allow their emotional innocence to exfoliate naturally rather than have it torn away painfully and too early. These tensions are constantly at play, so to speak, in the family vacation. Furthermore, since we’re on the subject, if perhaps we are unfortunate enough to lack “authentic” connections with one another in the first place, then what’s the point of seeking authentic experiences on a family vacation? Or can one help create the other? We need to ask these probing questions of family travel because the answers say so much about who we are and how we find the shared experience that allows us to communicate inside the family compact.
Why do families travel? Are parents trying to create bonds they are failing to make elsewhere? Are we broadening our children, or setting them up for dissatisfaction with their lives back at home? What is the value of travelling together as opposed to staying home together? Do we truly believe we are providing our children with valuable experiences, or just exposing them to the world so as to provide a baseline for future individual explorations? Or is it just about having fun? There is research being conducted today around the role of the family vacation in the creation of the family unit overall, and one of the terms in use for the family vacation is the “memory-making process.” The family vacation, as we can see, is an ongoing memory-creation operation that’s never going to be straightforward: It involves taking a multifarious and usually ill-disciplined unit—the family—sending it on a logistically complex mission—the vacation—and asking it to secure a poorly defined and highly subjective outcome—“fun.”
That doesn’t sound so hard, does it?
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Our first major stop on our Mexico-or-bust trip was Salt Lake City, where my parents wanted us to see the Mormons and the Tabernacle Choir. Why they did, I’m not sure. Perhaps it had something to do with the catholic and Catholic nature of our upbringing. My mother was, and still is, a devout Roman Catholic. My father respected my mother’s faith, but he was an avowed agnostic who used to stand in the bathroom on Sunday mornings, church day, with shaving foam on his face and his razor in his hand and answer our theological queries with things like, “How the hell am I supposed to know if there’s a God. Go ask your mother.”
Or it could have been the profligate nature of the procreative impulse on display in Salt Lake City; my mother might have reckoned it would do us good to see that Irish Catholics weren’t the only people that bred like bacteria. My mother was pregnant for forty-five of the first sixty-four months of her marriage, and on the day of my sister Janine’s birth my mother was a twenty-six-year-old woman with five preschoolers in the house. Much later in life I remarked to my friend Rich, who was also a friend of the family, how astounding it was to me that my parents hadn’t killed off one or two of us out of frustration and simple expedience. “How do you know they didn’t?” he said.
Salt Lake City was a place of great mystery to us, and its shrouded, misty December climate seemed suited to that feeling. I had trouble imagining who would want to live near a salt lake: what was the point of that? We toured the Tabernacle Choir, and Brigham Young University, and learned about the pilgrimage to find religious freedom. It made an impression, to be sure, but then our mother told us that some Mormons believed a man could have more than one wife. We kids absorbed that as best we could, and one or two of us simply looked our father’s way for help as to how we might interpret this. He said nothing, just offered his characteristic sly grin and then raised his eyebrows suggestively. My mother slapped him on the shoulder. We piled into the car and got back on the road.
In 1924, the renowned British essayist and travel writer Hillaire Belloc (who once walked across the western United States to visit his future wife) wrote a piece entitled The Road. “The Road is one of the great human institutions because it is fundamental to social existence,” he wrote. “The Road moves and controls all history.”
Belloc may have written those words nearly ninety years ago with some confidence, but he could hardly have known how prescient they were, particularly in relation to North American history. His thoughts on the connection between man and road coincided with something of a sea change in the national psyche which allowed the common person to believe that travel for leisure purposes was not just possible, but morally acceptable. Elmer Davis summed it up in 1932 when he wrote that the “pioneer conditions that made indolence suspect and leisure unknown discouraged the habit of traveling for pleasure . . . till good roads were general. There was not enough fun in it to make it worth while . . . Then suddenly, the automobile came within reach of every one. There were immense distances to be covered and a machine capable of covering them.”
Davis was broadly correct, but I think his words have particular resonance for someone from the western part of North America; in our own early family travels we had farther to go to get somewhere. It was that simple. On the wide and endless prairie where I was raised and still live you could drive for hours and hours, stop, get out of your car, look around, and be hard pressed not to conclude that you’d forgotten to put the car in gear back home. I have no doubt that in choosing to go to Mexico and back in 1973, my parents were not just trying to do something different and unusual for their children, but also that they simply had no choice but to go far away in order for us to see something far different.