I know I’ve considered attempting a re-creation of the Mexico trip my parents took their children on, but the truth is that it would be impossible to re-create even if we decided to try it. The vehicles of today, for one, are simply that much more comfortable, and I can assure you that a significant portion of the antics we got up to in the car were due to sheer discomfort. And we simply couldn’t allow our children to not wear seat belts, the lack of which was central to the free-for-all that ruled our car on the way to Mexico. There are more people on the roads today, more people at the sights worth seeing, simply more people period. And at the sights worth seeing, the level of bureaucratic people management has altered the nature of the family vacation experience, so that events and encounters are now more sanitized, more packaged—pre-experienced, as it were—so that we are too often informed beforehand, by aggressively cheerful “interpreters,” what we are supposed to feel and understand and take away. Of course, today we would have our own experiences, unique to us, memorable episodes in tune with our times. Of that I have no doubt, and it would be a good thing. But to consider the continental car trip as a way to reconnect with what our parents did for us is to indulge, I fear, in a kind of nostalgic and fruitless search. Such reconnection must, it feels to me, be performed through memory, not mimicry.
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In exploring the nature and history of the family vacation—how it’s evolved, what it means, how it shapes us—it’s fair to say that I’ve researched principally those areas that seem most applicable to my life and time. My take on the family vacation will also be less than comprehensive for two other reasons: First, the family vacation is still, as already alluded to, a relatively new phenomenon. Second, there is a shortage of data on the subject. The tourism studies field has grown in the last couple of decades, to be sure, which is understandable, given that tourism is such a vast global enterprise. But even as late as 1985, John Jakle opened his book, The Tourist, by saying, “I present this book as an argument for renewed scholarly interest in tourism.” Jakle has lived up to his end of the bargain: He has also written scholarly studies of the motel, the gas station, and the roadside fast-food restaurant.
The need for renewed interest is peculiar, though perhaps it has begun to happen since Jakle published his book in 1985. The level of tourist activity certainly warrants it. In 1999, Orvar Löfgren reported that 7 percent of the world’s total workforce was employed in the tourism industry by the mid-1990s, an industry in which $3.4 trillion is spent every year. By 2020, Löfgren noted, it is expected that 1.6 billion of the planet’s 7.8 billion people will take a trip abroad. These would appear to be significant numbers, but even as recently as 2003, research on the subject appeared to be lagging. Nancy Chesworth, a Canadian academic, wrote in the International Journal of Consumer Studies that, “A review of the literature on the impact of the family vacation experience in the fields of consumer issues, tourism, hospitality, home economics, family studies, psychology and sociology indicates little research reported to date. Furthermore, there has been little published in this area of study in the last decade. This seems unusual considering the high degree of importance placed on families and on vacations by societies around the world.” In addition, she found a lack of research on the impact of the family vacation on single-parent families, marital relationships, gender differences in terms of vacation choices and satisfaction, individual family members, the positive and negative impacts on children (including academic achievement and sociability), children’s reaction to holiday experiences, and the well-functioning family versus the mildly or seriously dysfunctional family.
Pretty much everything, in other words.
It’s perplexing that there are not think tanks and university departments specializing in the family vacation. If there is one, I wasn’t able to find it. As Jakle wrote in 1985, “The study of tourism, like the study of recreation generally, has not been recognized by most professions as a respectable field for scholarly inquiry. Apart from the bias against leisure inherent in the work ethic, the supposed superficiality of touristic experience has weighed against serious study.”
In the course of my research, I did find a book called The Nuclear Family Vacation, which initially elicited the satisfaction of finally having found something directly related to my own research, until I read the jacket and discovered that it was about a husband-and-wife team touring the world’s nuclear weapons production sites. There was also Christie Mellor’s The Three-Martini Family Vacation: A Field Guide to Intrepid Parenting, which I confess I did not read, primarily because I had already long ago endorsed what seemed to be its central thesis. There are academic books devoted to the family vacation; Neil Carr’s Children’s and Families’ Holiday Experiences, and Susan Session Rugh’s Are We There Yet? Rugh notes that the family vacation “fits squarely into the study of the history of tourism” but that the literature has focused on “authentic experience” without taking into account how family travel could alter that experience.
As for arts and culture, there have been many investigations into the family vacation over the years. A fine minor-chord road-trip story is Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana,” and although it’s not particularly heartwarming, Munro does capture, with her standard impeccable prose and insight, some of the strange pressures of being car-bound for long periods of time. We will, of course, always have the subtly realistic adventures of the Griswold family in the National Lampoon Vacation series. The creator of those films, John Hughes, who also made films such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Home Alone, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, got one of his first breaks writing satirically about the family vacation. His story, “Vacation 58,” not only ended up securing his employment with National Lampoon, but it became the inspiration for the first Vacation movie. Vacation 58 is a funny saga of one family’s road trip to Disneyland in 1958, replete with the station wagon, the cross-country drive from Michigan to California, an aunt dying en route, a father falling asleep at the wheel, a father driving off a cliff, a father robbing a motel, a father forgetting the dog tied to the bumper and then driving off, a father running from the law, a father pulling into Disneyland to find it closed for repairs, and a father snapping and hunting down, then shooting, Walt Disney.
Chevy Chase did seem ideally suited for the role. Yet despite the cornball comedy of both the story and the movie, the inherent satire did have a serious point to make, which, for me, is that “arrival” is overvalued and that a more measured approach to the journey itself is of value.
Possibly there is a shortage of fine writing on the subject because most of our artistically gifted and creative writers are simply too busy writing stories of misfit outsiders coping with alienation, loss, sexual jealousy, and the betrayals of their past. Perhaps writers and artists just can’t be bothered with the family vacation’s perceived and sometimes real sentimental overtones. But here’s a question: If you really do enjoy going on vacation with your family, and you really do think it makes you closer as a family, and if you really do think it’s important to say so, then is that sentimental? Why can this not be meaningful? Is it because drama constitutes art and happiness lacks drama? Maybe it’s just that most of our talented artists, writers, and thinkers were unlucky enough to have parents who didn’t take them on family vacations, thereby consigning them as children to summer holidays consisting of nothing but sitting in their rooms with the door closed reading book after book after book, ruining their eyesight, and dreaming of the day when they could escape their non-vacationing families, and get busy writing searing accounts of misfit outsiders coping with alienation, loss, sexual jealousy, and the betrayals of their past.
What all