Amanda Lamb: Family vacation

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched the 1983 classic, “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” with Chevy Chase, or even just stumbled across snippets of it while scrolling through late-night television, but it never disappoints.

I think the reason it has such staying power, even today, is that we’ve all been there. In the 1970s, my parents loaded up the wood-paneled station wagon to drive to my grandparents’ house in North Carolina from Pennsylvania. My brother and I lounged in the way back on the hard corrugated metal surface of the storage area, me ensconced in my red Snoopy sleeping bag working on crossword puzzles or reading one of my mother’s paperbacks that was far too advanced for my age.

When my kids were little, we loaded up the SUV with everything we might need (and not need) for a family vacation at the Jersey Shore with my parents. The stuff was piled so high, my husband couldn’t even use the rearview mirror. If someone threw up, there was no way to extricate a clean outfit from the carefully crafted pile – so a diaper and mom’s jean jacket would have to suffice while we burned up I-95 North on the way to the ferry in Lewes, Delaware.

Now that my children are adults, the travel is a lot more civilized. This month, they are flying to meet us for a vacation. We were not even sure they could make it initially with their job/internship schedules, but miraculously their schedules cleared when we suggested it. Even without the crammed SUV and the arduous trip up I-95, there will be obstacles, because family vacations are never perfect. In fact, anything that can go wrong is likely to go wrong. The beauty is not in the perfection of the vacation, but in your ability as a family to weather adversities together, big ones and small ones.

We’ve gotten a lot better at this as my kids have grown older. We know each other’s triggers and try to avoid them. Sure, there are still moments when everyone gangs up against me, or the girls gang up against me and my husband, or we all gang up against my husband, but they don’t last long. The importance is that we are together – experiencing new things as a family.

I’m not going to wax poetically about making memories, because simple, beautiful memories can be made in the most mundane moments – on a walk through Raleigh, sharing a joke on the subway in New York City, during a late-night chat in front of the fireplace. But once your children are grown, family vacations do become a more moment time to connect in a meaning way. Because what all of us long for the most when our kids fly the nest is more time.

It's ironic, isn’t it, that when they were little time moved so slowly? We thought it was infinite. But it’s not. Create some time with your children this summer, whether it’s a beach vacation, a weekend in the mountains, or a family outing to the neighborhood pool. I can count the amount of time I’ve wasted doing silly things in my life, but spending time with my children has never been on that list.

Amanda is a mom of two and an author of several books including some on motherhood. She is also a WRAL reporter and successful podcaster. She began writing Go Ask Mom columns in January 2010 and took a short break in late 2021. Now, you can find her posts monthly on WRAL Family.