Tales From the Backseat: A Family Road Trip

Episode 1 - We're Off To See...A Nudist Camp?

Everyone has childhood vacation stories. Dads taking too many photos. Moms obsessively giving handy wipes to each kid after they touched anything. And siblings forever wrangling for ever-precious inches of space on long road trips.

They're the stories everyone tells many years later at family reunions, with or without scrapbooks and slide shows, making fun of each other's clothing and antics, often opening old wounds long forgotten or never healed.

My story is from a month's long cross-country car trip taken by my family in 197...something. Traveling with my family that long revealed the good, bad and ugly in all of us. We saw much of our country; the interesting and even the strange. We met people. And we drove. We drove a lot. But most of all, we made memories that we'll always remember, for better or worse.

Dad had a thirst for adventure and a love for history. Owning his own business, he worked a lot, so this long trip was designed to see the country's history and experience its wonder with his children. He wanted to see it all, even the most unusual tourist traps in every state.

Starting from our home in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, we charted a course south, then west, then north and back east logging thousands of miles in our brown Oldsmobile station wagon.

The grind of the road was challenging right from the start. There were no electronic handheld games, no computers with movies on DVD, no headphones or earbuds with small private music devices, nothing. We had an AM/FM radio that everyone in the car had to listen to simultaneously, when we could get a signal.

For me, passing the time was easy. I was a bookworm. I packed a library full of books in the tote bag I won in a reading challenge contest and with my lifelong superpower to quiet the noise around me, I read and read and read.

My siblings weren't as lucky. My little sister brought some dolls to play with, but there wasn't a lot of room in the back seat. Being the smallest, she sat on the dreaded hump seat, encroaching on the leg room of me or my brother.

And as the youngest, her favorite pastime was getting attention by annoying my brother. She picked, poked and pinched him, along with endlessly begging him to play with her.

My brother had nothing to do. He didn't like books or puzzles. He liked sports. You can't do that in a car. So, for hours each day, he was bored and irritated.

Our first stop was to visit some of my dad's relatives in southern Illinois. My dad hadn't seen his cousins since they were kids. They were once great pals, but as things go when you get older, people go different ways and move away from each other.

My dad told us stories about how they played stickball in the city streets and got into some trouble. He loved telling stories and abundantly laughing at his own tales.

I thought it was a unusual to visit relatives you hadn't seen in forever, but he said my grandmother and her sisters were very close and always wanted family to stay connected, so my dad felt compelled to look them up.

Their house was in a rural south portion of the state and for hours, all we saw out the window was a lot of wide open spaces and farms. They weren't farmers, but they lived in a small town among them. Their two-story white farm house was modest and old with a long gravel driveway.

As we entered the house, I could tell my mother wasn't thrilled as the house was a little "I don't want to stick to anything" messy with a lot of clutter.

My father and his cousin shook each other's hands, laughed a lot and exchanged slaps on the back with joking comments about how old and fat they both got. I guessed that was normal for grown men. Their children were mostly in their late teens and early twenties, but one daughter who still lived at home, was only two years older than me.