After the Civil War, a middle class began to emerge, the Reconstruction Era ensued, prosperity increased, travel increased, and new modes of transportation emerged, which allowed for some, but not much, family travel. Around the turn of the twentieth century the still rather embryonic middle class saw the earliest signs of labour rights—meaning, among many other things, legislated holidays—and this had an inevitable trickle-down effect to the working class. African-Americans were seeing small gains in prosperity. Immigrants were settling and adapting.
By the time the First World War ended, the working class witnessed entrenched time off actually getting passed as legislation, though this was still often only expressed as the maximum number of working hours per week. Still, it was the thin edge of the wedge and it wasn’t long until vacation time was a concept and a reality that both worker and employer saw as the norm. When the Depression hit, it was, ironically, becoming more common for the family vacation to be seen as, if not a universal right, then at least a common expectation. Just prior to the Second World War, in fact, a recommendation for mandatory paid vacation for all workers was put before the US Senate. It failed, but it did create a sense of widespread acceptance that “the vacation,” paid or unpaid still to be determined, was something a worker could reasonably expect.
Of course, the family vacation has through time often been an expression of a society’s vision of itself. In the immediate post–Second World War era there was a newly felt freedom, the expansiveness of victory, and a relative level of affluence, all of which brought about a vacation mode wherein families of nearly every stripe piled into the big station wagon and travelled enormous distances, staying in motels, often driving halfway across the country simply because they could.
Yet the conservative, rather uniform nature of the family vacation during this period was also in many ways a reflection of the conformity of the time as exemplified by McCarthyism, and by a society shaken by the Kennedy assassination and shattered by Vietnam. The family vacation was also slowed, oddly, by feminism. As women increased their agency, went back to work, and had children according to their own desire to do so—developments that may have slowed the family vacation but which sped the development of our species—it became harder for a family to coordinate long vacations. Not only that, the Agates noted, the sexual revolution made it less fashionable for women to advocate for family togetherness.
And then came mass middle-class air travel. The increasing ease and declining cost of air travel made the international family vacation a much more likely possibility in the seventies and early eighties, and although mass air travel may have hampered the car trip, it positively killed the Atlantic-crossing industry. The phoenix that rose from those ashes was the cruise industry. They had to do something with all those ships. The cruise industry began with obsolete luxury liners, but soon enough it saw the value of catering to families. Today, there might be no aspect of the tourism industry more constructed around the family vacation, and increasingly the intergenerational family vacation, than the cruise industry. (And I’ll speak more to the historical details of both mass middle-class air travel and the cruise industry further on.) It took a century—roughly from 1850 to 1950—for the family vacation to go from being the exclusive purview of the wealthy to becoming, as Orvar Löfgren called it, a fully democratized institution. It’s now taken half that time again for the family vacation to become such an accepted cultural institution that no one even imagines today that it might have been our grandparents who fought for mandatory holiday time.
The social and anthropological history of the family vacation is evolving, too. One of the themes I want to explore throughout the book is that of safety versus experience. Although strongly shaped by personal observation, my belief is that the family vacations children grow up to remember fondly and/or vividly and which become part of family lore (and which therefore help us define ourselves, our families, and our place within those families) are achieved only by wrapping both arms around something we can’t embrace; namely, abandon. A disregard for outcome, if you will. You must plan for the unplannable, and the best way to care is to not care, to—at the risk of being sued—not prize safety over experience. Bear with me.
We baby boomers and immediate post baby boomers are obsessed with preparation, mapping, detail, specialization. Our culture wants certainty, guarantees, a return on our investment. And it appears we are now applying these approaches to the family vacation. Well-planned, organized, safe, a sound investment—we’ll get our money’s worth and the activities will warrant the effort—but predictable, homogenous, managed. The Disney Cruise?! Is this what we want from the family vacation? It’s the holiday equivalent of the gated community . . . and sometimes we holiday in a gated community. But don’t we want grist for family lore? Adventure? Fun? Danger? Hair-raising experiences served up by blithely oblivious parents? Will we find that on a Disney cruise? Franz Kafka once wrote that you needn’t frantically chase the world in order to find it, since it would “present itself to you for its unmasking” even if you chose to just sit at your desk and be utterly still and silent. And so it is with the family vacation . . . well, except for the sitting-still part. Simply the act of being together will open the world up to you and allow you to define it through family—the world that is your family will unmask itself with or without grand plans, with or without great sights and peak experiences. The value created by the family vacation, its long-term familial meaning, will not necessarily reside in whether you got on all the rides you wanted to at Disneyland, or whether you got the table by the window every night on the cruise. Observing and existing in each moment together—accepting instead of grasping, as Kafka is essentially saying—is the fertile soil from which memories and meaning will grow. Abandon. Risk. Accept. Of course, you will be forgiven if you choose not to put your faith in Franz Kafka as the patron saint of the family vacation, given that his most famous story is about a man who wakes up one morning as a giant cockroach.
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The road trip is an institution that has sometimes resulted in parents wishing they could be committed to one, and it’s hard to predict how it will evolve. There are the obvious environmental issues, although that is less about the vehicle than what’s fuelling it. Whether it’s hydrogen, battery power, even biomass fuel, families will still need ways to get from one place to another on their holidays. A more environmentally friendly fuel source might well fuel a resurgence in the road trip. The bigger question for me around the future of the road trip might be the creation of individual solitudes within the vehicle. Now that children have iPods, MP3s, iPads, and most significantly, movie centres that fold down out of the ceiling or the headrest in front of them, there is simply less chance for spontaneous interaction, less opportunity for something to happen, good or bad. Spending ten hours in a car will result in tedium somewhere along the way, and so whatever you can do to alleviate that can’t be a bad thing. It’s