Author's Note 7/18/25: Lori and I will be traveling quite a bit the rest of July and August, so loyal Laughable Feast readers will be treated (or subjected) to a few weeks of summer reruns. Some of you have seen these golden oldies before, and hopefully they have stood the test of time.
Soon we will be flying for the first time in eight years, so it seemed apropos to start with the Up With a Twist essay Fear of Flying. And since we are flying to Las Vegas, the following week will be a repost of Leaving Las Vegas. From The Way Back you will have the chance to read two stories – Freeze Frame and naturally The Way Back – both of which give you an indication of how hellish my family vacations were; two more stiff Up With a Twist drinks – I’m Just a Caveman and Free Bird – and a repost of Slack Tide from The Claustrophobia of Wide Open Space.
I hope all of you are having a wonderful summer and will indulge us in this short vacation. New posts will resume on September 5th.
When people reflect on family vacations from their childhood, many think of an idyllic week or two spent in some pine-scented cabin, canoeing on a pristine blue lake, frolicking in the forest and throwing pine cones at squirrels; or snug in a clapboard beach house, playing whiffle ball on the sand, riding bikes into a charming little town, playing Skee-Ball at the arcade and eating saltwater taffy until they burst; or hunkered down in a mountain chalet, knee-deep in powder snow, huddled by a roaring fire and languidly piecing together a jigsaw puzzle.
Whereas I do not.
As you may have gathered by now my father was not big on having fun and his zero-fun policy covered any and all forms of relaxation. So lazing by the lake or the pool or the fire was never on the itinerary. AO was, however, big on road trips. Really big on really big road trips.
Since becoming an adult and assuming responsibility for vacation planning, at least to the extent my wife consents, I have come to understand that road trips can be a form of relaxation – granted there is a lot of schlepping involved which is not so relaxing – and also a hell of a lot of fun. This was not the case on my father’s road trips. These two or three-week thousand-mile marathons can only be described as hell on wheels.
It was well after my mother died and shortly after my father married Aunt Fae – I don’t have the time or energy to explain such weirdness here so you’ll have to wait until I do – that AO let me and my sister in on a secret. He was hell-bent on setting foot in all fifty United States before he too perished. Why this seemed like a good idea let alone became an obsession remains a mystery, but in retrospect it does explain many nonsensical side-trips we took such as wasting a tank of gas driving to Delaware from New York so we could fill up, or while winding through the Badlands of South Dakota suddenly veering into Nebraska for a McDonald’s hamburger.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. These trips always started months in advance when AO received approval of his vacation request from the powers that be at US Bank and proudly announced the dates at the dinner table.
The dates he chose were always in late July or early August, thereby ensuring Karen and I were out of school, the high mountain passes were clear of snow, the non-air-conditioned car would be unbearably hot, and we could make full use of the sad, little, over-chlorinated pools at Holiday Inns.
AO would then “suggest” we visit some family in, for example, Laguna Beach, California that year. On its face, there was nothing wrong with such a plan, except that the faux family in this instance was a couple in their upper 80s whose idea of fun was taking us out for grilled cheese sandwiches and a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits. What my father did not reveal was his intention of pinballing through every state west of the Rocky Mountains to get to Southern California.
At this point, faced with yet another exhausting road trip, my mother would say something like, “Alfred, let’s take the kids to the beach or a lake for a couple weeks this year and just relax.” No, of course she would never say that. It was well known in our household those were my mother’s wishes, but my mother’s wishes were ignored until such time she deemed it necessary to pitch a fit – I believe these were genuine meltdowns but could’ve been just terrific method acting – and evidently relaxing on vacation didn’t rise to a sufficient level of need like, say, doing laundry in a machine instead of pounding it on a rock.
In any event, AO’s plan for the year’s road trip always went unchallenged and he would then proceed to pore over his coffee-table-sized, dog-eared Rand-McNally road atlas and plot a serpentine path to whatever destination served as the excuse for dragging us all through hell.
Normally, anticipating a vacation is almost as much fun as the actual trip and often ends up being more so. For my mother and sister and me it was like looking forward to a two-week-long dental appointment. And I’m not talking about just X-rays and a cleaning. When the month came up on the kitchen calendar the circled departure date glared at us like a black eye.
About a week before we were to leave is when the fun really started. Because that was the amount of time required to pack and load the car. Apollo moon shots were planned and executed with less attention to detail than one of my father’s road trips, and this level of care and concern extended to every square inch of our Samsonite suitcases, and even more so to the back of the family station wagon which would serve as our winged chariot and detention facility for the next fortnight.
By the time D-Day dawned – sleeping in on vacation was for babies and strictly forbidden so I mean ‘dawned’ literally – our suitcases had been packed and re-packed and their contents checked and re-checked by the authorities, and the car had been packed and re-packed and packed again, so all that remained for my sister and me to do was put on our pre-approved travel attire and trudge to the car with all the enthusiasm of GIs loading an LST before heading to Omaha Beach.
My mother was invariably late to the car because she had a number of last-minute things to take care of, which invariably caused my father to castigate her because she had all week to take care of these things, which invariably caused my mother to cry. Which is exactly how you want to start a family vacation.
Then, AO would announce that if Karen and I needed to use the bathroom, we’d better do it now because he wasn’t going to stop until we’d reached Idaho. I’m sure this sounds ridiculous to you, and of course I’m playing it for comic effect, but he really wasn’t kidding. Still, we always said no.
Rarely had we left the city limits before my sister would start to squirm and beg for a bathroom. Naturally we rarely got a mile beyond that before I started to poke my sister in the abdomen and taunt her for having a peanut bladder. To be fair, I’ll grant you it is difficult to pee under pressure, but this never stopped me from launching an offensive and drawing first blood on the trip. Militarily, the tactic was predictable yet unstoppable because even with our age difference, I already possessed slightly superior strength and girth and was fully prepared to use it to my advantage in subduing the enemy. Strategically, the tactic was moronic and suicidal because my father possessed vastly superior strength and girth and was fully prepared to stuff me in the engine compartment.
Since at this point we were doing 70 mph on the interstate and he had no intention of stopping until we got to Boise, AO would first attempt to separate the backseat combatants with all manner of threats delivered red-faced and yelling in the rear-view mirror.
By this time, my sister and I would be engaged in hand-to-hand combat that had escalated from poking and tickling to light punching and scratching, and neither one of us was ready to consider any kind of brokered diplomatic peace.
Which is why my father would then, without taking his eyes off the road and keeping one hand firmly on the wheel, reach around with his free hand, grab me by whatever fabric and flesh he could find, separate me from Karen, and using the superior strength and girth I mentioned slam me against the side door with the admonition I stay there.
This policing action was followed by stern instructions that my sister and I were to observe a demilitarized zone in the middle of the back seat. Which we did. For about a minute. We referred to the DMZ as ‘no man’s land’, which Karen took quite literally and considered it a no-go zone only for men, so she was always the first to violate the boundaries with sneak attacks and pinching maneuvers. I of course returned fire.
So by this time we might be somewhere around Troutdale on our way up the Columbia Gorge, which is all of 15 miles from downtown Portland, and war had broken out in the back seat of a station wagon.
My mother, who had been urging my father to find a bathroom for Karen would then upgrade her pleading to a non-negotiable demand, and AO, recognizing he was outranked and outgunned when it comes to girls going potty, begrudgingly would pull off the freeway and head for the nearest clean bathroom he could find. Which was always at an ARCO service station.
My father exclusively went to ARCO for gasoline and all we knew was that Chevron and Texaco gas caused the engine to knock, and that stopping at a Shell station was out of the question. We assumed they must’ve secretly supplied gas to the Japanese in WWII because he despised them. Whatever the reasons, while my sister and mother were going potty at the ARCO station, my father would bring Alfred’s silver hammer down upon my head and make me wish I was dead.
First, I had to be interrogated by the presiding officer. My father firmly believed there existed a wide variety of idiots in the world, and evidently suffered some short-term memory loss, because he often asked me what kind of idiot I was. I’ve always considered myself a garden variety idiot so it was thrilling to think I might be something more exotic.
Then, there would be a thorough reading of my war crimes before judge and jury, which consisted of my father of course, the sneering grease monkey pumping our gas, and maybe a couple of giggling kids in a Plymouth sedan next to us who were clearly on their way to an idyllic lake or something.
Of course, the kangaroo court found me guilty on all counts and in accordance with rules adopted at the Geneva Convention I was convicted and banished to the ‘way back’. With great pomp and circumstance, AO would march me around to the back of the station wagon, open the window and lower the tailgate, carefully rearrange luggage to create a small space, deposit me in my prison cell, slam the gate shut and throw away the key.
The ‘way back’ was a term common in our household, and perhaps in many others, but for those of you unfamiliar, it refers to that region of a station wagon beyond the back seat, which in a sedan would be the trunk, or in a coupe the pavement.
Our first family station wagon was a Chevrolet Biscayne and I have no recollection of the ‘way back’ in that classic beauty. My rap sheet proves I was there, but I did most of my hard time in a Chevy Impala wagon which we must’ve logged a couple hundred thousand miles in before upgrading to the top-of-the-line Caprice model complete with faux wood paneling and a seat in the ‘way back’ which faced backward. It folded down for more storage capacity but on road trips, as I hit my tweens and teens and was granted more clemency by the court, the seat was up and it became a cushy minimum-security facility like the kind where white-collar criminals work on their backhand.
I could go on and on about all the road trips, but by far the most memorable and deeply traumatizing was a month-long cross-country death march when mother Mary, sister Karen, and I flew to New Jersey after AO finished his MBA at Rutgers.
He had just bought the Impala wagon to congratulate himself and we embarked on its maiden voyage from Trenton to the other side of the North American Continent. The four-week trip was a brutal slog of 300-mile, 10-hour days visiting Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields, national parks and monuments, crusty old museums and kitschy roadside attractions, punctuated only by the occasional stop at Denny’s, McDonald’s, an ARCO station, or a Holiday Inn. Oh, and Delaware and Nebraska.
It was on that trip I learned the ‘way back’ was far from cruel and unusual punishment. I gradually fine-tuned the art of war, provoking my sister and antagonizing my father only enough to earn banishment without incurring capital punishment. Then safely ensconced in the ‘way back’, I could spend countless hours on the road watching the world recede through the back window, dreaming of all the places I’d rather be.
Sadly, as it turns out, my dad was right.
“Garden variety idiot” 🤣🤣