that there was an inkling that an automobile trip was anything less than the most convenient and carefree way for a middle- or lower-middle-class family to take a vacation.
In many ways, the golden age of the gas-powered automobile is not only over, but died a long time ago; we’ve just yet to fully accept the inevitable. Of course, we are still reliant in many key ways on the car, but less so than we were a decade ago, a trend that will be even more pronounced a decade from now. And who knows if alternative fuel sources for cars, such as batteries or hydrogen, will allow us to fully recapture our traveller’s imagination. Even the automobile industry’s core incubator group—young teenage men—are increasingly getting their thrills from different places, such as electronics and other technology. A 2004 story in the Los Angeles Times revealed that in the decade from 1992 to 2002, the percentage of males aged sixteen and seventeen getting their driver’s licenses dropped from 52 percent to 43 percent.
The sixties and early seventies—through the automotive confluence of the cost, safety, environmental innocence, and overall convenience—may well have been the apex of the family car vacation. This mode of vacation has become less predominant since then, given the rise in cost of gasoline, the rise in insurance rates, the introduction of mass air travel, the increased cost of lodging and food along the roadway, the deteriorating state of the highways, all combined with what has become an often crushing sense of crowdedness on the roads. Sometimes it seems as if, against all logic, there are more people moving than stationary. Who are all these people? I often ask myself now while driving on teeming highways. And where are they in such a rush to get to? A long drive on the highway used to be a pleasure; now it has the air of a chore.
This sense of congestion is not solely about the number of cars on the highway, but is also related to the hassle it has become in many major urban centres to actually get to the highway. By 2000, almost 80 percent of the population in Canada and the United States lived in urban areas, and of that number close to two-thirds lived in the suburbs, meaning that fully 50 percent of us live in a suburban environment. Suburbs have metastasized to monstrous degrees. More and more commuters live farther and farther out from the urban core, and use the suburban freeway system to get to work and get home. It has become a trial to find the open road, let alone travel along it. Travelling from one major city to another, particularly along the eastern seaboard, is not so much a highway drive as a series of hops between vast suburban links and ring road freeways.
All these factors speak to why the family vacation as expressed through the long-distance car trip already has an air of nostalgia to it, a Leave It to Beaver smell of a long-gone world we now choose to romanticize, but which we would have trouble re-creating even if we wanted to. Robert Sullivan, the author of Cross Country, predicted the demise of such trips in an article he wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times. The summer driving trip, meaning the “pack the kids in the car and set out for the West or the East or possibly the Grand Canyon trip,” is under threat. “It’s been endangered before,” he wrote, “especially during the first energy crises in 1973 and 1979, when people spent good portions of their vacation lined up at the gas station.” But today, referring mostly to the crowded attractions and highways, he concludes, “The death of the car-bound family vacation feels real to me.”
I know I’ve considered attempting a re-creation of the Mexico trip my parents took their children on, but the truth is that it would be impossible to re-create even if we decided to try it. The vehicles of today, for one, are simply that much more comfortable, and I can assure you that a significant portion of the antics we got up to in the car were due to sheer discomfort. And we simply couldn’t allow our children to not wear seat belts, the lack of which was central to the free-for-all that ruled our car on the way to Mexico. There are more people on the roads today, more people at the sights worth seeing, simply more people period. And at the sights worth seeing, the level of bureaucratic people management has altered the nature of the family vacation experience, so that events and encounters are now more sanitized, more packaged—pre-experienced, as it were—so that we are too often informed beforehand, by aggressively cheerful “interpreters,” what we are supposed to feel and understand and take away. Of course, today we would have our own experiences, unique to us, memorable episodes in tune with our times. Of that I have no doubt, and it would be a good thing. But to consider the continental car trip as a way to reconnect with what our parents did for us is to indulge, I fear, in a kind of nostalgic and fruitless search. Such reconnection must, it feels to me, be performed through memory, not mimicry.
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In exploring the nature and history of the family vacation—how it’s evolved, what it means, how it shapes us—it’s fair to say that I’ve researched principally those areas that seem most applicable to my life and time. My take on the family vacation will also be less than comprehensive for two other reasons: First, the family vacation is still, as already alluded to, a relatively new phenomenon. Second, there is a shortage of data on the subject. The tourism studies field has grown in the last couple of decades, to be sure, which is understandable, given that tourism is such a vast global enterprise. But even as late as 1985, John Jakle opened his book, The Tourist, by saying, “I present this book as an argument for renewed scholarly interest in tourism.” Jakle has lived up to his end of the bargain: He has also written scholarly studies of the motel, the gas station, and the roadside fast-food restaurant.
The need for renewed interest is peculiar, though perhaps it has begun to happen since Jakle published his book in 1985. The level of tourist activity certainly warrants it. In 1999, Orvar Löfgren reported that 7 percent of the world’s total workforce was employed in the tourism industry by the mid-1990s, an industry in which $3.4 trillion is spent every year. By 2020, Löfgren noted, it is expected that 1.6 billion of the planet’s 7.8 billion people will take a trip abroad. These would appear to be significant numbers, but even as recently as 2003, research on the subject appeared to be lagging. Nancy Chesworth, a Canadian academic, wrote in the International Journal of Consumer Studies that, “A review of the literature on the impact of the family vacation experience in the fields of consumer issues, tourism, hospitality, home economics, family studies, psychology and sociology indicates little research reported to date. Furthermore, there has been little published in this area of study in the last decade. This seems unusual considering the high degree of importance placed on families and on vacations by societies around the world.” In addition, she found a lack of research on the impact of the family vacation on single-parent families, marital relationships, gender differences in terms of vacation choices and satisfaction, individual family members, the positive and negative impacts on children (including academic achievement and sociability), children’s reaction to holiday experiences, and the well-functioning family versus the mildly or seriously dysfunctional family.
Pretty much everything, in other words.
It’s perplexing that there are not think tanks and university departments specializing in the family vacation. If there is one, I wasn’t able to find it. As Jakle wrote in 1985, “The study of tourism, like the study of recreation generally, has not been recognized by most professions as a respectable field for scholarly inquiry. Apart from the bias against leisure inherent in the work ethic, the supposed superficiality of touristic experience has weighed against serious study.”
In the course of my research, I did find a book called The Nuclear Family Vacation, which initially elicited the satisfaction of finally having found something directly related to my own research, until I read the jacket and discovered that it was about a husband-and-wife team touring the world’s nuclear weapons production sites. There was also Christie Mellor’s The Three-Martini Family Vacation: A Field Guide to Intrepid Parenting, which I confess I did not read, primarily because I had already long ago endorsed what seemed to be its central thesis. There are academic books devoted to the family vacation; Neil Carr’s Children’s and Families’ Holiday Experiences, and Susan Session Rugh’s Are We There Yet? Rugh notes that the family vacation “fits squarely into the study of the history of tourism” but that the literature
