account how family travel could alter that experience.
As for arts and culture, there have been many investigations into the family vacation over the years. A fine minor-chord road-trip story is Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana,” and although it’s not particularly heartwarming, Munro does capture, with her standard impeccable prose and insight, some of the strange pressures of being car-bound for long periods of time. We will, of course, always have the subtly realistic adventures of the Griswold family in the National Lampoon Vacation series. The creator of those films, John Hughes, who also made films such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Home Alone, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, got one of his first breaks writing satirically about the family vacation. His story, “Vacation 58,” not only ended up securing his employment with National Lampoon, but it became the inspiration for the first Vacation movie. Vacation 58 is a funny saga of one family’s road trip to Disneyland in 1958, replete with the station wagon, the cross-country drive from Michigan to California, an aunt dying en route, a father falling asleep at the wheel, a father driving off a cliff, a father robbing a motel, a father forgetting the dog tied to the bumper and then driving off, a father running from the law, a father pulling into Disneyland to find it closed for repairs, and a father snapping and hunting down, then shooting, Walt Disney.
Chevy Chase did seem ideally suited for the role. Yet despite the cornball comedy of both the story and the movie, the inherent satire did have a serious point to make, which, for me, is that “arrival” is overvalued and that a more measured approach to the journey itself is of value.
Possibly there is a shortage of fine writing on the subject because most of our artistically gifted and creative writers are simply too busy writing stories of misfit outsiders coping with alienation, loss, sexual jealousy, and the betrayals of their past. Perhaps writers and artists just can’t be bothered with the family vacation’s perceived and sometimes real sentimental overtones. But here’s a question: If you really do enjoy going on vacation with your family, and you really do think it makes you closer as a family, and if you really do think it’s important to say so, then is that sentimental? Why can this not be meaningful? Is it because drama constitutes art and happiness lacks drama? Maybe it’s just that most of our talented artists, writers, and thinkers were unlucky enough to have parents who didn’t take them on family vacations, thereby consigning them as children to summer holidays consisting of nothing but sitting in their rooms with the door closed reading book after book after book, ruining their eyesight, and dreaming of the day when they could escape their non-vacationing families, and get busy writing searing accounts of misfit outsiders coping with alienation, loss, sexual jealousy, and the betrayals of their past.
What all this adds up to is that, despite the fact that tourism is a huge part of the global economy, despite the fact that a high percentage, possibly even the majority, of this tourism is conducted by families, and despite the fact that family vacations are part of the core matter of self-definition of both the individual and the family unit, there has been disproportionately little serious study or art about the family vacation. This gap is surprising, since the family vacation is not peripheral but central to our understanding of the family construct. Recently, one or two researchers have begun looking at the family vacation from this point of view, such as the husband-and-wife team Sarah and Joel Agate, who conducted much of their research while at Clemson University in South Carolina. Their work is principally rooted in American history, but it’s revealing nonetheless. Speaking at the Vacation Matters summit in Seattle in 2009, they noted in a joint presentation that there was no historically significant record of the family vacation prior to the American Civil War. Families simply did not take vacations, for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being that most people were either poor or slaves. Not only that, there was a relative lack of focus on vacationing as a family, even among families who could afford it, largely due in the United States and to a lesser degree in Canada to what we might call a Puritanical hangover. People mistrusted the very idea of leisure, since there was a country to build and wilderness to tame and colonial barriers to overcome. Diligence was next to Godliness, and the Puritans of both the pre– and post–Civil War era were beholden to both. What chance, in this atmosphere, did the family vacation have of emerging, let alone thriving? The upper class travelled as families, but that didn’t really count: their whole life was a vacation.
After the Civil War, a middle class began to emerge, the Reconstruction Era ensued, prosperity increased, travel increased, and new modes of transportation emerged, which allowed for some, but not much, family travel. Around the turn of the twentieth century the still rather embryonic middle class saw the earliest signs of labour rights—meaning, among many other things, legislated holidays—and this had an inevitable trickle-down effect to the working class. African-Americans were seeing small gains in prosperity. Immigrants were settling and adapting.
By the time the First World War ended, the working class witnessed entrenched time off actually getting passed as legislation, though this was still often only expressed as the maximum number of working hours per week. Still, it was the thin edge of the wedge and it wasn’t long until vacation time was a concept and a reality that both worker and employer saw as the norm. When the Depression hit, it was, ironically, becoming more common for the family vacation to be seen as, if not a universal right, then at least a common expectation. Just prior to the Second World War, in fact, a recommendation for mandatory paid vacation for all workers was put before the US Senate. It failed, but it did create a sense of widespread acceptance that “the vacation,” paid or unpaid still to be determined, was something a worker could reasonably expect.
Of course, the family vacation has through time often been an expression of a society’s vision of itself. In the immediate post–Second World War era there was a newly felt freedom, the expansiveness of victory, and a relative level of affluence, all of which brought about a vacation mode wherein families of nearly every stripe piled into the big station wagon and travelled enormous distances, staying in motels, often driving halfway across the country simply because they could.
Yet the conservative, rather uniform nature of the family vacation during this period was also in many ways a reflection of the conformity of the time as exemplified by McCarthyism, and by a society shaken by the Kennedy assassination and shattered by Vietnam. The family vacation was also slowed, oddly, by feminism. As women increased their agency, went back to work, and had children according to their own desire to do so—developments that may have slowed the family vacation but which sped the development of our species—it became harder for a family to coordinate long vacations. Not only that, the Agates noted, the sexual revolution made it less fashionable for women to advocate for family togetherness.
And then came mass middle-class air travel. The increasing ease and declining cost of air travel made the international family vacation a much more likely possibility in the seventies and early eighties, and although mass air travel may have hampered the car trip, it positively killed the Atlantic-crossing industry. The phoenix that rose from those ashes was the cruise industry. They had to do something with all those ships. The cruise industry began with obsolete luxury liners, but soon enough it saw the value of catering to families. Today, there might be no aspect of the tourism industry more constructed around the family vacation, and increasingly the intergenerational family vacation, than the cruise industry. (And I’ll speak more to the historical details of both mass middle-class air travel and the cruise industry further on.) It took a century—roughly from 1850 to 1950—for the family vacation to go from being the exclusive purview of the wealthy to becoming, as Orvar Löfgren called it, a fully democratized institution. It’s now taken half that time again for the family vacation to become such an accepted cultural institution that no one even imagines today that it might have been our grandparents who fought for mandatory holiday time.
The social and anthropological history of the family vacation is evolving, too. One of the themes I want to explore throughout the book is that of safety versus experience. Although strongly shaped by personal observation, my belief is that the family vacations children grow up to remember fondly and/or vividly and which become part of family lore (and which therefore
