culture in which families exist has changed, so the vacation has adapted to fit or reflect that culture. The family vacation, in both structure and meaning, has evolved as society has evolved, although one or two seismic shifts in the nature of the family vacation have, I think it’s fair to say, moved the needle on the broader culture. How families choose to vacation is a clear expression of who we are, and the nature of the family vacation tends to reflect, and sometimes even predict, societal change.
The family vacation, then, is central to how individuals and families define themselves, how families form, and most particularly how these intensified periods in the life of a family continue through the years to replenish our individual and shared memory pools. “Family memories offer us a way to make sense of our family history,” writes Susan Sessions Rugh in her book Are We There Yet? Vacations are significant events in the lives of adults and children: we remember them keenly for good reason—because they help tell us who we are and how we fit into our family. The vacations I went on with my family when I was growing up may have been fun, but they were also much more than fun; the nuance and richness of what it all meant has only gradually been revealed through adulthood and the raising of children. I understand much better now that the manner and quality of vacation a family experiences together are a symbol for many things besides a trip’s stated raison d’être (which is frequently interesting enough in and of itself, of course). It can also be viewed theoretically, moving into the philosophical sandbox of thinkers like the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and his ideas around the interpretation of experience, which are relevant to how we interpret the experience of the family vacation. To boil a dozen works of philosophy down to a few sentences (which I am only too happy to do), Baudrillard says we live in an ongoing state of “hyperreality,” that we utilize and then inevitably begin to prefer representations of reality rather than reality itself, and that the human condition is so impossibly overwhelming that our experiences can’t help but devolve into mere encounters with simulations of reality—simulacra, he calls them—encounters that we end up preferring to reality. We’d rather visit New York–New York hotel in Las Vegas than actually take on New York’s crime, grime, and complexity; we’d rather consume pornography than deal with the complications of real sex; we feel stronger emotional ties to characters on TV than we do to the flawed and inconsistent people in our own lives. And so on.
Sounds odd, I know, but once you’ve visited Disney’s various themed experiences, been to a dude ranch, or seen the “island” Royal Caribbean built to replicate a real tropical island, you might think Baudrillard is on to something. This is a counterpoint to what Orvar Löfgren calls the stance of the “anti-tourist” and the obsession with locating “authentic” experience, or that of the “post-tourist” who has given up trying to find new and authentic experiences, and has joined in with the throng going to Disneyland, knowing it’s fake but taking their fun with a heavy dose of irony. There is no such thing as inauthentic experience for the post-tourist, because even an encounter with an utterly fabricated site—a fake island, say, or Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson tree house (a fake of a fake, since it was a fictional experience and the “tree” holding the tree house is made of steel, concrete, and stucco)—will nevertheless yield insights into contemporary culture.
Authenticity comes up again and again in travel and leisure literature, but what, precisely, do we understand by the word authenticity, anyway, as it relates to our travel experience? There’s no easy answer for that, and much depends on what you’re looking for in the first place. We all know that a “tourist trap” is something contrived and manufactured and best avoided, but what if we are looking for tourist traps? What if we like tourist traps? Don’t we then want to find the most authentic tourist trap? Of course, there are times when even being sure of what you want won’t help you find it, given that much of today’s marketing is not just manipulative or misleading (we expect that) but blatantly fraudulent. Recently in both Spain and my home province of Alberta tourism marketing bodies were found to be using photos of exotic locations to stand in for home base. Alberta used a beach in Northumberland, England, of all places, to represent Alberta’s natural beauty; Spain used a photo of a deserted Bahamas beach to stand in for its crowded Costa Brava.
So the question What does it mean for a family to go on vacation? is certainly not as simple as it might first appear. We want our children, and ourselves as parents, to have as much access as possible to what we view as authentic, real, genuine experiences and places, however we define that, though we also want our children to gradually be exposed to the world’s complexity, part of which is undeniably the way in which our leisure is manipulated by corporate interests. We want our children to touch and know the world as it is, but we also want to keep them physically safe and allow their emotional innocence to exfoliate naturally rather than have it torn away painfully and too early. These tensions are constantly at play, so to speak, in the family vacation. Furthermore, since we’re on the subject, if perhaps we are unfortunate enough to lack “authentic” connections with one another in the first place, then what’s the point of seeking authentic experiences on a family vacation? Or can one help create the other? We need to ask these probing questions of family travel because the answers say so much about who we are and how we find the shared experience that allows us to communicate inside the family compact.
Why do families travel? Are parents trying to create bonds they are failing to make elsewhere? Are we broadening our children, or setting them up for dissatisfaction with their lives back at home? What is the value of travelling together as opposed to staying home together? Do we truly believe we are providing our children with valuable experiences, or just exposing them to the world so as to provide a baseline for future individual explorations? Or is it just about having fun? There is research being conducted today around the role of the family vacation in the creation of the family unit overall, and one of the terms in use for the family vacation is the “memory-making process.” The family vacation, as we can see, is an ongoing memory-creation operation that’s never going to be straightforward: It involves taking a multifarious and usually ill-disciplined unit—the family—sending it on a logistically complex mission—the vacation—and asking it to secure a poorly defined and highly subjective outcome—“fun.”
That doesn’t sound so hard, does it?
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Our first major stop on our Mexico-or-bust trip was Salt Lake City, where my parents wanted us to see the Mormons and the Tabernacle Choir. Why they did, I’m not sure. Perhaps it had something to do with the catholic and Catholic nature of our upbringing. My mother was, and still is, a devout Roman Catholic. My father respected my mother’s faith, but he was an avowed agnostic who used to stand in the bathroom on Sunday mornings, church day, with shaving foam on his face and his razor in his hand and answer our theological queries with things like, “How the hell am I supposed to know if there’s a God. Go ask your mother.”
Or it could have been the profligate nature of the procreative impulse on display in Salt Lake City; my mother might have reckoned it would do us good to see that Irish Catholics weren’t the only people that bred like bacteria. My mother was pregnant for forty-five of the first sixty-four months of her marriage, and on the day of my sister Janine’s birth my mother was a twenty-six-year-old woman with five preschoolers in the house. Much later in life I remarked to my friend Rich, who was also a friend of the family, how astounding it was to me that my parents hadn’t killed off one or two of us out of frustration and simple expedience. “How do you know they didn’t?” he said.
Salt Lake City was a place of great mystery to us, and its shrouded, misty December climate seemed suited to that feeling. I had trouble imagining who would want to live near a salt lake: what was the point of that? We toured the Tabernacle Choir, and Brigham Young University, and learned about the pilgrimage to find religious freedom. It made an impression, to be sure, but then our mother told us that some Mormons believed a man could have more than one wife. We kids absorbed that as best we could, and one or two of us simply looked our father’s way for help as to how we might interpret this. He said nothing, just offered his characteristic sly grin and then raised
