Oh spare me, Clark, I know your brand of family fun. Tomorrow you’ll probably kill the desk clerk, hold up a McDonalds, and drive us 1000 miles out of the way to see the world’s largest pile of mud! – Ellen Griswold, National Lampoon’s Vacation

So I know you’ve been waiting to hear about my road trip in that cool car from the Vacation movies. That’s right folks, the Wagon Queen herself, headlights and all. And you know what? It was a heck of a lot more fun than a pile of mud.

Of course that’s partly because HomeAway.com (proud owners of the car –and did ever a company own a more random thing? I’m not sure) didn’t stop with giving us a ride in the car. For three nights in June, they put me and Tommy up in several of the many vacation properties they rent online, the first of them in Sandbridge Beach, Virginia, south of the Virginia Beach boardwalk.

I wouldn’t say that Sandbridge was convenient to the Norfolk Airport, which we flew into (it took over an hour to get to our condo, although that was also because our driver got lost, one of several taxi fails on this trip) but I think there may be a reason for that. This was our view out the window of the condo:

Sadly we didn’t get to frolic on this lovely (and quiet) beach because it rained the one morning we were there. Despite the gloomy weather, Tommy did take a dip in one of the condominium’s gorgeous pools, which was surrounded by a huge patio full of large gas grills and comfortable chairs and tables. And when it really started raining we made the best of things (easy to do) hanging out in our condo and playing Uno on the balcony.

The distance from civilization is a clear asset here: I could see loading up a car with food (and if that car happened to be a huge 1983 station wagon, all the better), beer, and suitcases with bathing suits and little else in them and spending an entire vacation swimming, playing cards, and cooking meat outside. Or perhaps lounging around the living room.

But like the Griswold family, we couldn’t stay in one place – we had a mission to find family fun. Later that morning, after the clouds had burned off, John and Stephanie (known collectively as “The Truckies”) showed up with the car. Neither they or it disappointed. John’s first words to Tommy were “Dude! You’re a Phillies fan! I knew we’d get along,” thus cementing the kind of love and loyalty demonstrated only by 8-year-old boys and puppies. And Stephanie laughed at all of his jokes and was untiring in her willingness to do Mad Libs.

And the car. If you’re of a certain age, do you remember how wide cars used to be? I bet you don’t. Do you remember how springy the seats used to be? I bet you don’t. Do you remember that smell of oil and must and whatever happened to be rolling around under the seats and in the back? Close your eyes, and let me take you back to 1983. Even the radio seemed to channel the era, playing nothing but Journey and “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” (When it didn’t emit the most alarming high-pitched electronic scream I’ve ever had the, er, pleasure, of experiencing.)

The nice people at HomeAway had no particular agenda in Virginia Beach except to show Tommy a good time. I was too distracted by the fact that I was actually riding inside the Griswold Family Truckster to pay much attention as we rode down the main drag one block off the beach from the boardwalk, but that’s OK, because Tommy was keeping his eagle eyes open. When we parked the car and asked him what our agenda should be, his immediate and obvious response was “Eat sushi. Then play pirate mini-golf.”

And lo, perfectly serviceable sushi was to be found at Soya. Between the four of us we ate a more than healthy number of rolls including the Volcano – shaped as named. When we had depleted the city of Virginia Beach of a good portion of its tuna, salmon, and (I think) scallops – it was hard to tell in some of the rolls – we all turned to Tommy who knew exactly where a super pirate-y adventure was to be found.

So we said ahoy to this guy:

And I played a very hot and competitive 18 holes of mini golf with these scurvy dogs:

Come to think of it, I never did find out who won. John? You still have that scorecard?

And what comes after a long round of mini golf in the hot sun? Oh yeah, that’s right, ice cream with tons of rainbow sprinkles!

And a ride on the self-proclaimed “Biggest Inflatable Water Slide in the World.”

All of this was just about the most simple kind of slightly tacky and not-too-expensive family fun you can have at the beach of course. But the best part to me was actually free. It was spending the better part of the afternoon standing with Tommy in the waist-deep water facing down the biggest waves with grins on our faces, salt on our lips, and our hands clasped. Some day he will remember only that he got to ride in that crazy car. But I will remember the way his hand felt in mine as the water lifted our bodies. (And that I got to ride in the crazy car.)

The farmers market and concert we were supposed to attend that evening got rained out suddenly and ferociously, and the four of us ended up taking a very damp refuge in one of the many seafood restaurants along Virginia Beach’s main drag (honestly, it was not especially memorable and I didn’t bother to write the name down). I think we may have all smelled like the car a bit. Certainly we were already old friends: Tommy and John watched the Phillies play the Yankees and Stephanie and I chatted and then they took us home to our beautiful condo where I opened all the doors and windows and listened to the waves until I fell asleep.

And I hope you’ll read more about my trip in the Wagon Queen Family Truckster in these posts:

Colonial Williamsburg (and beyond) in the Truckster
Your top 5 questions about riding in the Truckster answered

Disclosure: Our entire trip, including giant slide rides and rainbow sprinkles on our ice cream, was paid for by HomeAway.

Yes, I realize that it’s Tuesday and even almost Wednesday in some parts of the world, but since I actually had this dream on Monday and just didn’t find time to record it, I’m going to give myself a pass.

This past weekend I was at a conference with many other travel bloggers. One of the things you realize pretty quickly when you get into a room full of people like that is how many different ways there are to travel, a diversity that’s of course reflected in the many different websites. There are the mature travelers, the solo travelers, and those who travel in pairs. There are the luxury-resort travelers, the spa travelers, and the twenty-dollar-a-day travelers. There are gear heads and hikers and cyclists. There are political travelers, environmental travelers, and foodie travelers, to say nothing of travelers like yours truly who are just trying to figure out how get as many places as possible with their kids in tow (and who may or may not be married to people who don’t like to camp. But that’s another post).

One of the things that really seized my imagination was all of the young faces I saw in the crowd, kids in their twenties who have just set out on their own. Their presence made me realize something I wanted to be true, but wasn’t sure of, namely that I have a deep hope in my heart that my children will take time to travel before they have commitments or mortgages or children themselves. I want them scruffy and sandaled, carrying backpacks, sleeping on friends’ floors, drinking beer and meeting new people wherever they go. I want them to miss trains, go for days without showers, and grow beards so that I don’t even recognize them. I want them to climb mountains and dive off of cliffs into the ocean. I want them to encounter the other and have the other encounter them, to explore many different foods, cultures, and landscapes. I want them to experience the limits brought on by fear and fatigue but also the absolute freedom of having no set agenda and no one to report to.

When I saw how happy these travelers looked, how friendly they were, how willing to engage with the world, it made me realize that even though I know I’ll worry, I want both my kids become nomads for at least a little while.

I won’t lie: Partly I want this for my kids because I never did it myself (and who’s to say I won’t join my children for part of their journey if they choose to take it?). But I also think I want it because I believe that the best way to learn how and why to help save the world is to see it in all its fragile beauty. And when I did an internal check it made me feel great to realize that I would be ready to embrace my children’s travel dreams, whatever they end up being. Because that is the kind of parent I want to be.

So what are your Monday, er I mean Tuesday, dreams? Please feel free to share them below. Questions? See About Monday Dreaming.

This Monday is actually a day of realized dreams for me, as a project I’ve been working on behind the scenes for some time has finally come to fruition. I’m so pleased and proud to announce the launch of Best Family Travel Advice – the place online to get your family travel questions answered by parents who love both to travel and to share their knowledge with the world.

How does Best Family Travel Advice work? It’s simple really. You have a question about anything related to family travel – say how to baby-proof a hotel room, where to go out to eat with kids in Boston, or how to survive a family reunion. Simply visit the site and plug your question into the banner that’s at the top of every page. Questions will be reviewed by the team and will be answered in posts on the site (we’ll be sure to e-mail and let you know when the answer to your question is live).

So who will be answering your questions? That’s the best part! I’ve work with Amie O’Shaughnessy of Ciao Bambino, Michelle Duffy of Wandermom, and Jennifer Miner of The Vacation Gals – all of them wise and seasoned family travelers in their own right – to assemble a crack team of family travel bloggers. These are the real family travel experts who have been in the trenches and have tons of insight and information to share.

And while you’re at the site asking your question, take a look around to see some of the questions that the experts have already answered. From cruises to car trips, packing to Paris, we’ve already got some great information that will make traveling easier and more fun.

So here’s my Monday Dream: That everyone who reads this post will visit Best Family Travel Advice and ask some questions. And then, I hope they bookmark it, subscribe, and consider it their own insider source of family travel answers. Kind of like a good friend who knows all the best places to go and what to do when you get there. (Oh, and to really fulfill my dreams maybe you’ll follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.)

What are your Monday Dreams? Please feel free to share them below. Questions? See About Monday Dreaming.

It might seem obvious that I didn’t enter this world as a traveling mother, although sometimes even I forget that fact. No, first I was a kid who traveled not too much (except that year in Italy), then an adolescent and young adult who got around a bit, finally someone who was gainfully employed and actually did things like fly to India or spend too much money on expensive cocktails in swank hotel bars. But everything changed eight years ago today when Tommy entered the picture.

It didn’t take Matt and me long to decide to hit the road with Tommy – less than three months in fact. It all started with a simple plan that we cooked up in our sleep-deprived bliss: We would drive from Delaware to Kansas City to visit my best friend, see her new baby, and show Tommy off, and then drive home. But we couldn’t drive all the way out there without stopping to see Matt’s family in Wisconsin on the way back and if we stopped to see them, we had to make sure we passed through Vermont where my parents live. And before you could say family travel we were on a 3-week, 4000-mile trek through 15 states and Canada.

Now, some people might have waited until their child was a little older, until he was sleeping through the night or nursing less often. Another couple might have taken into consideration personal quirks, like the fact that Matt has an abhorrence of long car trips and that I like to spend nights in bed and breakfasts situated far off the interstate. But we were so captivated by Tommy, so thrilled with our new status as parents, so eager for Tommy to be held by many loving arms, that we chose to spend approximately 60 hours driving and to stay in a string of chain hotels in places ranging from Bettendorf to Buffalo so we could visit our large extended family.

And of course, as this all played out, I realized how different it was to travel with an infant. No, I couldn’t pump breast milk en route even if it was Matt in the driver’s seat. Yes, I could amuse Tommy with finger puppets for an hour at a stretch. My education was immediate and visceral. I nursed him in gas station bathrooms and in mossy hotel armchairs that smelled of cigarette smoke. I discovered he shared my aversion to the loud music that so many family-friendly restaurants feel it necessary to play (oh, I want to tell them, if you turned down the music you might not have the sounds of so many shrieking babies to cover up). And I watched as, in the nastiest of all the hotels we stayed in, Tommy rolled from his back to his belly for the first time.

I was officially a traveling mom. (And in case you’re wondering, I have about ten photos from that trip, mostly of grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles holding an infant Tommy. Somehow taking pictures just wasn’t a priority.)

This was of course a mere warm-up exercise for our trip the following year when we would sell our house, store our possessions, and hit the road with Tommy for 13 months. And I have to say from our first nightmarish apartment in Boston to our lovely hotel stay in Rome to our three blissful months in Southern California, Tommy proved always to be an excellent traveler– cheerful, resilient, interested, eager to explore, and happy just to throw rocks in water or drives his trucks on whatever surface presented itself. I loved exploring our many different destinations with him and will always treasure memories of watching him crawl with all his might into the Atlantic Ocean, throw his coin in the Trevi Fountain, and ride the Zilker Zephyr in Austin.

Now  of course all that’s behind us and seemingly as a matter of course we’ve become A Family That Travels. Recently Tommy observed to me that we go away a lot more often than any of his friends or even acquaintances from school. He said this wonderingly and then asked where we would be going next. He wanted to be sure that I knew he thought we need to go to San Francisco. And Hawaii. Oh, and Australia – and maybe Japan too? And don’t forget that we need to return to Paris….

I’m grateful to Tommy for so many things, but most of all for slowing me down and making me realize what travel is really all about: Anticipation. Exploration. Living in the moment, even if that moment isn’t quite what you had planned. And most of all, unexpected joy.

Happy Birthday my big 8-year-old traveling companion. I look forward to so many more adventures with you.

Note: I originally published this post last year, but share it with you again today in honor of my mother.

Much of the advice I offer about traveling is actually the opposite of what my mother would have done. When planning for a trip, a good rule of thumb is to consider what her approach would have been and then to do the exact opposite.

I write this with all due gratitude, for she certainly was the first person to expose me to travel. Reeling after she and my father separated when I was eight, she took me and my sister from suburban Connecticut to Italy for nine months. It was my first trip on an airplane, to say nothing of my first experience with a foreign culture. But I’ve written elsewhere about the lack of travel-planning prowess this trip demonstrated. Suffice it to say that I learned much about how not to travel in the three-day odyssey from New York to Florence via Reykjavik, Luxembourg, and Basel, all of it without more to eat than bread, chocolate, and Coke.

For many years after her death, I saw my mother as less of a traveler than a fleer. She was a restless soul who never found comfort or happiness but who never stopped trying, running from place to place as if she was being chased.

Three months before she died, I watched her roll in a wheelchair onto a jetway at the Philadelphia Airport. She was in terrible pain and was wearing a wig to cover her decimated hair, but she had a chance to meet friends in Los Angeles and she wasn’t going to give up an opportunity for a final vacation. The passage of time has helped me to realize that she wasn’t always running. Just as I do, she loved travel for all its joy and possibility, for the opportunity to see things from a different perspective, to step outside the boundaries of workaday life, if only for a little while.

As I look back, I realize that my mother taught me to notice and delight in the little things about a place. Things like fresh strawberry tarts from a bakery on the Rue du Moulin Vert, which she ate greedily sitting on my narrow dorm-room bed. Or the feeling of cold sand on our feet on a Nantucket beach in October where we walked for hours as if hypnotized. There were bags of blueberries and beach glass that we brought back from Maine and apple blossoms that she snipped from a tree with her Swiss Army knife and forced into full glory at our Dutch friends’ house. She delighted in the absurd, and I can still hear the laugh she let out when we happened on the funny grave in the Montparnasse Cemetery where M. Pigeon lies forever in bed next to his (undoubtedly long-suffering) wife. This acute and charming ability to notice small but essential details is obvious in the drawings I share here, which come from a sketchbook she kept while visiting me in Paris and Amsterdam during my junior year abroad.

What I really can’t believe is that she never had the chance to travel with my boys, to see Tommy running across the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence, just as my sister and I once did, or the way that Teddy fell head over heels in love with the Eiffel Tower. She deserves a lot of credit for the way that they respond to the world. It is because of her that when we travel we seek out and eat the best ice cream in our given locale every day that we are there. It is because of her that we made a pilgrimage to Monet’s garden at Giverny (a place she herself never saw in person) and that I made sure Tommy had his sketch book and pencils. It is because of her that I know the importance of making the effort, of trying something new, even when I feel at my most low. It is because of her that I seek constantly to share that which is beautiful with my children, whether it be sunlight coming through a stained glass window or shining on pine trees at the top of a mountain.

It is because of her that I know that a restless heart doesn’t need to be an unobservant or unloving one. What more could one ask to be taught about traveling with one’s children?

In memory of Jeanne Estelle Paradis, 12/20/1942 – 4/29/1999

A site I love to visit to virtually satisfy my wanderlust is The Carey Adventures. Peter West Carey is a terrific photographer. He’s also a dad and world traveler with a love of animals and climbing mountains.

I recently got a chance to ask Peter some questions about a travel photography project he’s undertaking this year. Titled the People, Places & Patterns Project (or just P⁴ for those hip and in the know) it will be a photographic expedition through Spain, Morocco, Kenya, Tanzania and Nepal from February through May resulting in a photo road show that Peter plans to share in schools, libraries, and community centers. I found his answers revealing not only about the practicalities of family travel (he’s got some great insights about how to make it happen) but also about just what motivates those of us who like to travel with our kids.

Why do you want to take these trips, why now, and why these countries?

These trips sprang from a couple bits of inspiration. Morocco has always been on my mind with my dream being to fly into Spain and boat across. Maybe the idea is a bit romantic, but it also saves about 20,000 frequent flyer miles to land in Europe rather than Africa. There is so much about Morocco I don’t know (and am quickly learning) and that for me has always been a wonderful reason to visit a country.

Nepal is a return trip for me alone. I’m traveling with Matt Fioretti of Four Winds Expeditions. The chance to climb a 20,000′+ peak was very enticing to me. While technical, it is not on par with Everest or K2. Every climber plans on returning home alive! I still hunger for adventure, but because of my daughter Sabrina, I temper it by attempting to stack the odds in my favor. Also, on my last trip I wasn’t as photographically focused as I could have been. I lack photos of the wonderful people who color the country so vibrantly. I want to go back and see what there is to learn for the people as well as the place.

Finally, I’ve wanted to take Sabrina to Africa for a long while, but have been waiting until she’s at an age where, to me, it seems she’d appreciate it more. So I’ve waited and waited and then, about this time last year, my cousin mentioned he’d be spending a year in Tanzania. His family from the USA would travel with him so we’d have a place to stay. The kicker is he’s a pediatrician in Seattle and someone I’d definitely trust my with my daughter’s health. While I don’t anticipate any reason to use his skills while in that area of Africa, it became a good excuse to visit. I also added Africa because my daughter was only a few thousand frequent flyer miles shy of a free trip. A special on purchasing miles at the end of 2009 sealed the deal. Kenya got added to this trip for frequent flyer reasons as well, because flying into Nairobi was much, much easier to fly into, miles wise, than Dar el Salaam in Tanzania.

Where did the idea for this project come from?

After nailing down where I wanted to go, I came to a moral question. Was I really just going on these trips to see and do stuff, again? Sure my daughter would be with me for Africa and this experience will be a huge eye opener for her, I hope. And when I return I plan on presenting some of the pictures to her school so they too can learn a bit about these different places she will surely talk about at recess.

Then, why not spread that idea a bit further? The more I thought about it and batted the idea around with friends, the more I loved the idea of making something of a traveling road show out of the experiences. I know I have the photographic talent and I love seeing that spark in kids’ eyes when they are shown pictures from distant lands. Why not make this all a bit bigger? After all, the motto I have on my business cards reads: EXPLORE-INSPIRE-EDUCATE. Here’s a chance to live up to that ideal.

My latest goal is to make sure I present the images to at least 50 school rooms, 10 libraries and 20 community groups before the end of 2010. I plan to keep this project going for as long as there are interested students, teachers and adults and will be adding to the work with future trips near and far.

Can you talk about how being a parent influences you and what role (if any) it played in making the decision to embark on this project? Is there anything you hope that your daughter is going to learn from what you do?

My role as a parent has made a huge impact on planning these trips (I consider them two different trips as there is a month at home between Africa and Nepal). I mentioned some of my thoughts on climbing in Nepal already. For Africa, I am putting a lot of effort into making sure the trip is kid friendly. I have a close friend who volunteered to go with us to Africa and if were just we two, chaos might abound as I enjoy that type of travel. But I know my daughter likes to know what’s coming up as much as possible. I believe she likes to see an area before we go and she, like most of us, wants some input.

To that end, I’ve been borrowing books like crazy from the library to help introduce the cultures of where we are going. I realize there isn’t a lot to draw a kid to Morocco, as compared to all the classic safari animals in Kenya and Tanzania, so I’m doing what I can to make that part of the trip fun for her. And, honestly, it might include a night or two at a hotel with a pool because she’s like a fish that way. What does she remember about a week spent in Mexico three years ago? The hot tub on the balcony.

I don’t have any specific plans for what I want her to learn. My plan, instead, is to simply open the world before her and let her explore it while remaining close to answer questions. No, this doesn’t mean I’ll push her out the door in Marrakesh and tell her to be back by sundown. But I do firmly believe that children who are exposed to different cultures tend to see the world differently than those who never leave home. They tend to ask more questions and have a different context for which to understand communication and culture.

I also hope it will broaden her horizons about what is possible. When I grew up my dad traveled a lot and we were at the airport every other week it seemed. Then my parents took a few trips abroad for business and brought back toys from Ireland and trinkets from Germany. I believe now somewhere along the way the seed was planted within me that you can, indeed, travel to far off lands if you want to. Although it took me a while to get out of the country, I’ve always had dreams and plans that included learning more about the world outside the borders of my day-to-day life. And now it’s painfully clear I’m trying to transfer some of that wanderlust onto my child. May the brainwashing take.

What is it that you find particularly compelling about the prospect of sharing your photos with children?

I loved looking at the photos in social studies books when I was a kid and I know a lot of children still love that. Now imagine there was someone there, between you and the big screen at the front of the school currently showing a mud-covered baby hippo trailing behind its mother. And that person can tell you exactly what it was like to watch the pair play in the water for 30 minutes before taking the photo. On top of that, imagine being able to ask that speaker any number of questions about hippos or anything else on the screen.

Schools have enough budgeting woes and teachers are often bogged down with resource planning and following district regulations. This means that not many teachers have the time or resources to bring in a professional photographer to speak with kids. I have a number of friends who are teachers but not one of them has asked me to show anything from my trips to their students. But the moment I asked them if I could come in with photos from these trips, all of them said yes and started proposing ways in which I could make it more fun and interesting for their kids. The demand is there and the kids are willing. It just takes someone to say, “This is one thing I know I can do, that doesn’t much for anyone involved, that can make a positive impact on some of the children.”

The presentations will be free to any school, library or community group that requests it, assuming that I can find a cost-effective means of getting to the location. I’ll be starting with the Puget Sound region of Washington because that is where I live. But I’ve already received requests from Utah, Oregon, and California and have started planning trips.

If you’re as impressed by Peter’s attitude and excitement as I am and would like to help him out, he’s accepting donations until February 16, 2010 at his People, Places & Patterns Project website. Contribute at least $30 and he’ll give you a 5×7″ signed, custom-printed photo from his trip. The money raised will be used to fund both the trips and the ensuing road show.

All photos courtesy of Peter West Carey.

Over the past twelve months, I have written and published 38 Monday Dreaming posts, which, given the fact that during that time I completely redesigned my blog and switched blogging platforms, seems like a respectable achievement. So today I’m taking a moment to look back and reflect.

I love writing these posts, which brighten the most mundane of suburban mornings and add glamor and adventure to my weekly routine no matter where I am or what I’m doing. From Paris to Pasadena, Nepal to Barcelona, my dreams have included both places I’ve seen and those I’ve only read about. A few of my favorites include:

• My Valentine’s post about Santorini, where I spent my honeymoon;
• A post in which I imagine a family trip to Thailand (oh, the street food);
• My dreams about the nearby city of Philadelphia (who knew there was so much to do right up the road?);
• Childhood dreams reflected in a country fair; and
• Sweet dreams of pastries at Ladurée in Paris.

But don’t let my opinions sway you; please feel free to browse all of my Monday dreaming posts to choose your own personal favorite.

Who knows where my dreams will lead me in 2010, the year in which I will also turn 40. I feel very lucky to know that a number of dreams, including taking my children skiing, visiting the Bahamas, and seeing Stonehenge are very likely to be realized in the months ahead (I plan to write about all of them of course). But I look forward also to imagining new possibilities with you, my readers.

So tell me – what are your dreams? What places would you like to see The Mother of All Trips visit, if only virtually? I’m certainly open to suggestion. And since I’d like to break my record and hit all 52 of the Mondays in 2010, I’m likely to need some help. If you leave a comment below and share a place you’d love to see me write about, I’ll be sure to mention you and link to your blog (if you have one) in an upcoming post about that locale.

And please also feel free to share a link below, making sure you link directly to your post, not your site’s homepage and that you link back to this post. See About Monday Dreaming if you have questions.

Here is a basic truth about traveling with children: There are always a million reasons to stay at home, many of them good ones. This is especially true at the holidays.

I offer this year’s Thanksgiving trip as a good example of this fact. And were I to choose to, there are a number of problematic things I could focus on. It took us over 11 hours of driving to get to Vermont thanks to some really bad traffic around the New York/Connecticut border. We had to do this driving in two cars because Matt was returning to Delaware for work earlier than I wanted to go home and a one-day, one-way rental cost as much as a weekly round-trip rental. The boys (both of whom had a nasty cough) got up before dawn each day we were there and were ping-ponging off the walls and each other by mid-afternoon. There wasn’t any snow this year, and the day after Thanksgiving when we usually go for a long walk to work off all that food was rainy and nasty. Worst of all, my father is having some health issues that required near daily treatment while we were there and caused side effects that to a less stoic person might be debilitating.

Reading that paragraph, you might wonder why I’m writing about this as a Monday dreaming post, indeed why I’m writing about it at all on a blog that is intended to encourage readers to travel with their kids. But believe it or not, this is not a cautionary tale. For in spite of everything I list above I have an even longer list of reasons why any expense or headache or hassle was worth it.

That list includes eating a wide array of homemade treats, watching my dad read bedtime stories to the boys, kicking back over jigsaw puzzles and Trivial Pursuit, looking at boxes of old family photos and realizing that Tommy and I have eyes that look just like my great grandmother’s, listening to my father and Matt banter while they watched the Packers together, getting a private tour of the Ben & Jerry’s factory (private by virtue of the fact that no one else was along), going to the movies, watching Tommy play for hours in the backyard with his canine best friend Riley, taking a long walk on a country road, playing tetherball on a playground surrounded by mountains, and enjoying a gorgeous November day on the shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington.

But mostly the trip was worth it for one reason: the chance spend time with a multiple generations of families and friends, people who all take the same trouble to travel so that they can see the boys and remark on how they’ve grown and how much older I am (if I had a nickel for every person who asked how old I would be on my next birthday and then blanched when I said 40, I’d be at least a dollar richer). Truth be told, everyone doesn’t always get along. Nerves get frayed, petty differences are aired. But we all come together and breathe and talk and laugh and tell the same stupid jokes under one roof.

So today I’m dreaming of more family holidays. Not the perfect ones you will find in Christmas carols or in the spreads of magazines. No, the messy real-life kind with the challenge of getting there and back, the mixture of affection and exasperation that inevitably ensues when groups of diverse individuals who may not share a lot in common beyond DNA get together in an enclosed space, and where individual problems become a shared endeavor. Where people pitch in to do the dishes because it’s what they can do to help. Where there is pie. When I return from these trips I may feel tired, but I also feel richer for having made them. More than any of the other traveling we do, they remind me of just why I pretty much always bother to pack up the kids and go.

And if this post finds you rushing out to buy plane tickets, I hope you’ll stop for a minute and visit the Passports With Purpose site where we have surpassed our goal of $13,000 for a school in Cambodia and are now working to raise even more money to fund things like clean water and a school nurse. All funds raised go directly to American Assistance for Cambodia (AAfC), which is a non-profit 501(c)3 registered in the United States; this organization will oversee all aspects of building the school. Ten dollars buys you a chance to win $150 to spend on photographs at Shutterfly or one of many other wonderful prizes. Chance to win make wonderful holiday gifts.

What are you dreaming of on this Monday? Please feel free to share a link below, making sure you link directly to your post, not your site’s homepage and that you link back to this post. Questions? See About Monday Dreaming.

Happy first day of fall everyone in the Northern Hemisphere. If you’re like me, this is a time of year when you’re energized and planning new beginnings including (hopefully) some fun family trips. But even as I watch the leaves pile up in my yard, I also like to spend some time reflecting on summer, that great season of beaches, barbeques, and long car rides.

After this summer, I know from road trips. At the end of June we drove 2855 miles over an 18-day period. Starting in Delaware, we headed first for Wisconsin and then continued on to Kansas City before heading east through Saint Louis and Lexington (with a detour to Bardstown, Kentucky for some Stephen Foster and fried chicken) and then back home. Our August trip to Vermont and Labor Day weekend in Manhattan brought us up to a grand total of over 4000 miles for the summer.

A few pertinent details that might make this all more vivid:

• Our car is small and it kind of smells like BO.
• The CD player didn’t work for the first 850 miles.
• Boy oh boy was there ever candy yessirree. And deep-fried sauerkraut.
• There was no toy that had a screen in the car with us.
• We tried to stay at 60 miles an hour or under. We succeeded, kinda.
• Scooby stories? Four or five. Crying? 20 minutes total.

And lest you’re now plotting to hop in your own car and drive without stopping to Delaware so as to rescue my offspring, I offer this anecdote: at the end of the super-fun, week-long visit with family in Wisconsin that involved attending a major league baseball game I asked Tommy what his favorite part of the trip so far was and he said, “driving out here!” as it were the most obvious thing in the world.

And no, I didn’t pay him to say that.

Nor did I drug him.

And no again, I’m not some kind of evil genius.

Which brings me to Road Trip Tip #1: Attitude is everything.

Planning road trips is important, and so is making sure you’ve got enough books, stickers, and black licorice. But the most important thing you can do before, during, and after long car trips is to treat them as if they are fun. Think of those hours of driving as special family time; you’re all together without interruptions, a veritable miracle in this plugged-in age.

So what can you do? Share music. Tell stories. Read favorite books from your childhood aloud. Let the kids get a little bored and then look for license plates or play word games. Give them snacks they never get at home. Talk about where you’re going and where you’ve been. And although I’m not one to proselytize about the virtues of old-school car trips, I’d like to suggest that traveling without screens and headphones – at least part of the time – is a good idea. Because really, how much time do we all get to really listen to each other?

I promise you: If you treat the time in the car like it is something special, something fun, something to be shared, your children will respond in kind. And before you know it, you will have actually made it all the way across the interminable expanse that is Pennsylvania (or Nebraska, or Iowa, or Texas…you fill in the blank). And maybe you’ll even be looking forward to the trip home.

This post is the first one in my 2009 series of Road Trip Tips. Other tips in the series include:

• Eating on the road
• Be a little sneaky
• Music, music, music
• A detour can be your friend
• Don’t underestimate driving times

And if you like this post, you might also want to check out my end-of-summer series from last year, titled originally enough, “What I Learned on My Summer Vacation.”

So we’re going home to Delaware tomorrow, after three weeks in Vermont. The car will be loaded with all of our gear and bicylces plus a gallon of maple syrup and loads of new books purchased for a quarter apiece at the library sale at the Waitsfield Farmers Market. We’ll also be virtually weighed down with treasure, all of it collected from the Mad River.

Tommy took it upon himself yesterday to make a treasure tally. He counted 111 pieces. He sorted all of them into different categories such as “sea glass,” “dirty white treasure,” and “unusual treasure.” Then he drew a graph to show how many we had of each kind (the rocks in the picture cover his full name, which he proudly printed on his handiwork).

I don’t know what I like more, his careful arrangement or his accounting.

But now it’s time to go and we’ve packed the treasure along with a number of river rocks that will be used as votive holders, worry stones, and garden decoration back home. These are not the only treasures that I’ll carry though. There are lots of memories that will be coming with me. Memories such as:

Both my children playing in the sun-dappled water of the river – water so clean that it’s possible to see the polished rocks lying at its bottom, even in the mysterious and dark deep places.

The duck that joined us one morning at the river, swimming circles and quacking companionably.

Listening to lots of Queen, especially Bohemian Rhapsody, sung by the other three members of my immediate family.

The feeling of sitting on the porch in the late afternoon, sipping a beer, looking out over the pond that adjoins it, and having Matt look at me and say “you look sun clean and river washed” and realizing that both things were indeed true.

The taste of heirloom tomatoes and fresh basil warm from the sun.

And the leap into silky, cool, green water on a hot day, Tommy’s hand in mine.

Summer is almost over and these memories will have to last me through a long winter. I have a feeling that they will though. And I feel very rich indeed.