This week’s Culture Study Podcast is about EVERYTHING WE DON’T TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT PERIOD PAIN — death cramps, final boss periods, fibroids, butt pains, PTSD, let’s go!! Listen here.
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“We had a 15-passenger van that my dad modified by removing two bench seats and putting a mattress on the floor. Since he had to work, my mom and her best friends would take 8 kids under the age of 10, and we'd drive from Bakersfield, CA to places like the Grand Canyon and Arches National Park. We drove with a huge cooler full of sandwiches (next to me on the van floor, where I lay and read my book as my mom did 60mph), and everyone had to use the bathroom at every rest stop. Looking back, I realize my mom was a superhero.” - Kathleen
“I grew up with a single low-income hippie mom in Canada. Vacations were visiting friends and family — usually via epic road trips in our broken down car. I have really good memories of these trips: listening to CBC and singing, and stopping for popsicles. And never quite sure where we were going or who we would see.” - Alix
“We never flew. We never rented a house; I have vivid memories of a Best Western near Intercourse, PA, with a swing set and a pool out front. The five of us shared one hotel room (two queen beds and a cot) and a single bathroom. Activities were usually a mix of historical/educational sites, shopping for the adults, and 1 (one) day at an amusement park to exhaust us kids.” - Amanda
I was talking with friends about their summer plans the other day — the difficulty in scheduling camps, figuring out when to go where and for how long, how to manage official time off work and concert plans. I started thinking of what’s really stuck with me from my own summer vacations, growing up solidly middle class in a small town in North Idaho. We’d go camping. We’d go hiking. A few times we went and stayed at a friend’s old family cabin. One time, in Central Washington, we got rained on so aggressively, with so little hope for respite, that my parents sprung for a room at the old school resort on the lake, and we started going there for a week every summer. The highlight was a big ice machine and a hot tub.
Last week, I asked Culture Study subscribers to describe their summer family vacations: where they went, of course, but also how they understood the purpose and meaning of their family’s choices. What did they remember? How has that memory shifted with time? Who did the labor? How did it feel? What mattered — and what didn’t?
A few themes emerged — ones that are worth turning over as we approach this summer and the perceived demand for highly orchestrated family leisure. What follows is my attempt at loosely organizing them, with the hope, as always, that we’ll collectively elaborate even further in the comments.
1.) The Family Summer Vacation Was Not Fancy
I cannot emphasize this one enough: the trips people remember, the ones they cherish, were not fancy. They cost money, but they were not the sort of thing you put on your credit card and paid off for the rest of the year. Vanishingly few of them involved airfare of any kind.
Almost always, they involved driving places — and driving many, many hours to get there. Depending on when you grew up, those drives may or may not have involved seat belts. On road trips, many people camped, or slept in an old airstream, or stayed with friends and family members along the way. If hotels were involved, they were Best Western-style — beloved for their novelty, not for their elegance.
You rarely ate out — even if you were on the road. You ate sandwiches made at rest stops, drank pops from the cooler. Or: you went out for very special treats, like a slurpee from 7-11, a dip cone from Dairy Queen, a popsicle from a gas station. Meals were places where money could be saved, not spent.
Sometimes vacation was just going to a relative’s and reveling in the newness of place, the different breakfast cereals in the cabinet, a toy you’d only seen on commercials. Some people from middle-class families went to family lake cabins purchased generations ago when middle-class earners could afford things like lake cabins. Usually these spots were lovingly maintained by no-frills; people slept on floors and couches and smashed in bunk rooms with no insulation. Others went for a week to the beach (particularly if you were from the East) where you rented a rickety place by the week smashed next to hundreds of other rickety places. Where you stayed mattered far less than the fact that you were there, and there was not home.
I’m making this sound gauzy and nostalgic, the way we often do when describing the simplicity of our youth. But that simplicity matters; it’s what allows the other memories to come to the fore.
2.) The Family Vacation Was Not Structured
The closest thing to a structure was a road-trip that involved specific destinations: national parks, battlefields, historical monuments. Most of the time, there was a destination, and a general idea of things you could do at that destination (ride in circles on your bike, play cards with your grandpa, go to the beach) but few requirements to be at a certain place at a certain time doing a certain thing.
Vacation meant hanging out with adults who weren’t working and open, in a way they seldom were, to leisure: card games that endured, afternoon hammock reading that stretched for hours, swimming and swimming and swimming some more. It also meant hanging out with other kids (who may or may not have been related to you) with little to not direct supervision. Adults were around, in other words, but cared far less about controlling exactly what you did.
Friendships and alliances and informal hierarchies are manufactured and destroyed quickly; I vividly remember one lake weekend, staying at our neighbor’s grandparents’ cabin, when the kid next door started calling me “Burnt Toast” (I didn’t have a sunburn; this made no sense) and it was all I could think about the whole week and clearly all I remember of that weekend now (scratch that, I also remember watching a VHS tape of Napoleon and Josephine, a mini-series starring Jacqueline Bisset released in 1987).
If you were vacationing with your siblings, it was a period of intense negotiation: you had to figure out how to be even closer to one another than you were on a daily basis for long periods of time, but you were also reliant on each other for entertainment, since your parents’ primary objective with the trip was not engaging you. If you were with other kids, it was a period of accelerated social development, especially since the other kids usually spanned a pretty wide age group. What was cool, what was weird, what was baby stuff — all those ideas were negotiated with alarming speed.
I always remember feeling very alive during these vacations — like my skin was feeling everything, like everything tasted better and stronger, like I was tired but so excited to wake up and do nothing and everything. You’re constrained by location and opportunity but also empowered to write the story of your own day, even if that story was just walking down to the creek by yourself with a sandwich and then catching some grasshoppers and walking back to a cold generic pop waiting for you in the fridge. The best summer vacations are like that: somehow so limited and yet so expansive.
3.) The Family Vacation Was Not Novel
The most memorable family vacations involve tradition in some capacity. That tradition might be a road trip (with different destinations) or a fixed destination or going down the shore for one precious week in mid-July or your fish camp up north or a very specific campsite with the good creek at Dworshak Reservoir.
The repetition was part of what made it meaningful — the knowledge of where you’d go, what you’d see, what you had to look forward to or dread. The smell of an overheated transmission is just as much a part of these memories as learning a new card game. My mom had a grocery list for camping that included the same shishkabob marinade every weekend and that consistency was as much a part of the joy as spending hours poking the fire.
Of course, there are small variations to the familiar: a different national park, book-on-tape, car fiasco, or hot teen boy at the beach shack next door. But those things felt manageable and survivable and even pleasurable within the familiar, consistent vacation architecture. The vacation becomes a palimpsest of every vacation that came before, stories and memories peeking through of that one summer when the bugs were so bad, or your uncle taught you to waterski, or the raccoons got into the trash. The verses of each summer change slightly but only in a way that makes the chorus all the more meaningful.
4.) The Family Vacation Was (Largely) Screenless
Sometimes there were family movie nights where everyone would watch a movie together, but the recurring media of summer vacation are books, games, and music. Music on the speaker, on the radio, in the background, like a soundtrack; books in the backseat of the car, books in a sleeping bag, books in a hammock, books at the beach. Puzzles and cards and Trivial Pursuit that pisses you off because all the questions are for all the old people. Someone in your family would have a point-and-shoot with a new roll of film — but only 24 available attempts to capture the week, and that was that.
Some of this screenlessness encourages spending time with other people. But some of it grants you the freedom to dive deep into a book that you might avoid if there was a television (or phone) to absorb you. It makes space for your mind to both focus and roam. It’s another form of constriction that, in practice, generates a tremendous amount of freedom.
5.) The Family Vacation Wasn’t Always Fun
Maybe your parents kinda hated each other and vacation brought it out most vividly. Maybe your mom resented her mother-in-law’s hovering surveillance and you always knew something was weird when everyone was together but couldn’t quite understand it until you were old. Maybe you hated hiking — I certainly did — and pouted through every Petersen Death March until you were in high school.
I feel ambivalent about forced togetherness, but I also think that most adults, several decades removed from the experience, understand that part of being a kid is figuring out how to eek fun out of the options adults make available to you as to how you’ll spend your days. What small delights blot out the long expanses of tedium? How do you learn to be interested in your own weird mind? How do you not just tolerate but have fun with the most annoying person in the world, better known as your sibling? Vacation isn’t de facto fun. It’s a space to figure out all the different shapes fun can take.
To state the obvious: how your family defines hard work, leisure, and rest when you’re a child shapes your own relationship to all three as an adult. Who makes “casual” vacations feel that way? Do you pay others for the labor that makes dinner appear, or do family members (almost always women) do it in the background? Who “deserves” rest on a vacation, and who drives the car? If you only have two weeks off a year, how do you allocate that time? Whose interests and understanding of fun do you fulfill?
I’m still thinking through all these questions, but the one thing that rings out from the hundreds of answers in last week’s thread is that a good vacation is not optimized. It is not over-planned or scheduled. It does not demand too much from any one person, or privilege one person’s leisure over all others’. And it is not centered on what children want. All worthy considerations as we look to the seemingly endless sprawl of summer weeks ahead. Personally, I want to wake up the same way I did every random summer morning, feeling so alive to the season, thrilled for a day of another day of everything and nothing, all at once. ●
I also remember a highlight of our summer being sent to my aunt's in a small city about an hour and a half away to stay with our cousins for a few days. We slept in and watched soap operas and walked to the convenience store to get Slurpees. It was the best! We were entirely satisfied with that vacation. We looked forward to it every year. Did I want to go to Disneyland? Of course! Was I jealous of those that did get to go? Yes! But I still had a lot of fun wherever we were. - Erin
As a child, almost every single family vacation was to visit extended family. The message imparted was a duty to visit family (and be in either emotional or actual service to them while on that trip). Now, as an adult, I am working to amend the deep-seeded feeling that wanting to go somewhere purely relaxing or rejuvenating with my nuclear family is an urge to be resisted. This is big work. - Millie
My family of seven spent all our summer vacations in Bobcaygeon, Ontario. We went every year as soon as school was out. We always stayed at the same fishing camp. We had a small cabin with a wood burning stove and no running water and of course, no bathroom. There was a bath house at the camp that we shared with all the others who had come up for the week. Even though we kids were responsible for hauling wood for the stove and water to drink and do dishes, we loved it. It was two weeks that we spent almost totally free. There were no schedules. No Lessons. Really no chores, since hauling wood and water were novel for us. We swam and fished and played tag and cards. It was ideal for us kids.
This year will be by 70th year going back up to Bobcaygeon for my summer vacation. The old camp is gone and we have found another place to stay. My children and grandchildren join us, and this is still the one place I feel totally free. I can't imagine going anywhere else. - Lee ●
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One thing I believe has changed drastically is the price of staying in any sort of cabin. People who have family cabins can reproduce the sorts of experiences children had in my youth or in my children's youth, but rentals now, regardless of how modest, that are anywhere near water or a national park are completely out of reach cost-wise for most families who cannot camp.
When we want to go away now, it can never be for more than, say, three nights, because of the price of any sort of accommodation with cooking facilities and a refrigerator. And it would be once a year maximum.
I am curious about the consistency of the memories of 1980s family vacations on this thread (mine match too!) What can explain it? My family - including my parents - now have more flying, international, etc trips, whereas in my childhood, it was camping or car trips to family. I remember once we stayed at a Hilton in Indianapolis on a road trip because everything else was full and it was like the fanciest of fancy, and my parents were anxious about the cost.
One thing I have usually ascribed it to in my case is class. I grew up lower middle class (military, one income). But then I went to college out east to an Ivy, first in my extended family to do anything like that, and then grad school, academia, and and. I am not wealthy but I have more money than my parents did, including my partner’s salary. And I fit the “cultural elite” stereotype I guess, which is mostly about education.
But here’s the thing: Many other people I met in college who were from wealthy backgrounds had fancy family vacations in the 80s. They would not necessarily see themselves in this thread. They flew to Europe, went to summer camps, swam with turtles in the Galapagos, etc. When I went to an Ivy, it was my first experience realizing that this whole other fancy world existed.
So my question: I wonder if there is something about this thread and who reads AHP, which is an amazing group of people, as far as I can tell, that pre-selects for people “like me”, who grew up middle or working class, but through higher education now have more contact with culturally elite experiences, even if we don’t have elite budgets? In other words, is this really only a generational shift or are we also tracking some kind of class shift? I could just be reading my own personal experience onto the group, but this has always been how I attribute the difference (except for all the other points that are relevant, like internet, cheaper airfare, shift in parenting culture…)