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ALSO BY CURTIS GILLESPIE
The Progress of an Object in Motion
Someone Like That
Playing Through
Crown Shyness
Copyright © 2012 Curtis Gillespie
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Gillespie, Curtis, 1960–
Almost there : the family vacation, then and now / Curtis Gillespie.
Ebook 978-1-77102-030-5
1. Family vacations—Humor. 2. Gillespie, Curtis, 1960– —Family.
I. Title.
GV182.8.G54 2012 306.4'8125 C2011-908272-1
Editor: Janice Zawerbny
Cover design: Michel Vrana
Cover images: Folded Map: Jami Garrison / dreamstime.com; Vintage neon: Darla Hallmark / dreamstime.com; Retro Diner Interior: jgroup / istockphoto.com; Sunny Beach: Trout55 / istockphoto.com; Canola Road Sunset: Ben Goode / dreamstime.com; Toy Car: Michel Vrana
Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,
a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,
390 Steelcase Road East,
Markham, Ontario L3R 1G2 Canada
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
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This book is dedicated to my mother, Pat Gillespie,
for reasons too numerous to itemize (all of them good).
The perceived importance of family bonding to the construction of a happy family . . . situates the family at the centre of tourism and tourism as a potentially core component in the healthy maintenance of the happy family. The good parent, within this construct, is someone who ensures the well-being of the family through the provision of holiday opportunities for the family that allow the unit to bond together away from the distractions of the everyday.
— Neil Carr
Associate Professor, Department of Tourism,
University of Otago, New Zealand
Children’s and Families’ Holiday Experiences
There’s no such thing as fun for the whole family.
— Jerry Seinfeld
Contents
SIX Variations, Permutations, and Implications
SEVEN The Future of the Family Vacation
IN THE SUMMER of 1973, my parents announced our family was going to take a trip. A trip, mind you. They didn’t use the word vacation because, I suspect, it implied things they weren’t willing to commit to, such as our safety and comfort. The plan was that in mid-December eight of us—mother, father, and six children aged three to thirteen, five boys and one girl—were going to pile in our faux-wood-panelled Ford Country Squire station wagon and drive through the middle of the continent from Calgary to Mexico City, then turn around and come back along the west coast. Six weeks. Eight thousand kilometres. Through the high snowy passes of Montana and Utah. The emptiness of Arizona. The heat of the central Mexican desert. I still find this next fact hard to square with a memory of sane and loving parents, but once we got past Utah we were going to camp. Every night in a three-room eighty-pole oilskin canvas cave that when rolled up was roughly the size and weight of a small refrigerator. It took four of us two hours to put up and almost as long to take down, and had once caused my father to suffer a perforated hernia. I loved that tent, but I hated it, too.
We
