Travel tales provide fond family memories

A lot of our family adventures involved vehicles. I'm not talking here about the kind of trips where you're lucky to all be alive when you get back home, with nobody in jail for assault and battery, and Mom not hospitalized for whatever the clinical term is for turning into a jibbering idiot from stress. No, I mean simply the incidents that were concerned with some form of transportation vehicles.

To be honest, the first adventure preceded our marriage by a few months. Russ was on the college baseball team and rode the team bus to a game, to be dropped off in The Dalles afterward. The plan was that I should drive his car from where he'd left it in Vancouver to his parents' home in Klickitat, and we'd pick him up later.

Unfortunately, his car was stick-shift, and I was an automatic-transmission person. Every time I tried to shift from first gear, horrible grinding noises happened, so I chickened out. By the time I got to Camas I had a huge following, and they weren't applauding. Periodically I pulled over to let about 20 cars pass, then tried it again. More grinding noises. Sometimes I powered past the horrible mechanical clashing into some unknown gear, and went lurching and jerking down the highway until I gave up, pulled over and started out in first gear again.

It was a long trip down the curvy Washington side, but I utilized all the pull-outs. I always wondered if I had any responsibility for the motor work a short while later, but I kept my mouth shut. Russ didn't know about my adventure until we'd been married over 30 years.

Nothing interesting happened in our other plain old cars, but the van was different. The kids were used to hearing Mom's worn-out travel threat, "You don't want me to stop this car and come back there!" After we got the van, Shawn's eyes widened in surprise the first time I said, "You don't want me to come back there!" and then did it. Russ was driving, so we didn't have to waste time pulling over.

In addition to that convenience, the other good thing about the van was that space in the back where, regardless of seat-belt safety, Katy could lie down on the floor when she'd totally grossed out the other kids with her carsickness, and the medicine that was supposed to have prevented it finally took effect. Well, it sort of took effect. All it really did was make her sleep between bouts.

We decided to give the four kids a train and plane experience when they were the right age ... that is, when the two younger ones were old enough to remember the event, and the two older ones were still young enough that traveling with parents wasn't painfully mortifying. We chose a spring-break plane flight to Disneyland and a train ride back.

The two older children were relieved they'd no longer have to hang their heads in shame about being the only kids at school who hadn't flown.

I don't know about those two younger ones. When we were high enough to be above the cloud layer, 3-year-old Shawn said in a disappointed voice, with his plugged ears causing him to speak loudly enough to entertain nearby fellow travelers, "Huh! We've been up here a long time, and I still don't see God!"

Katy learned how to use air-sickness bags.

We never had any fun boat trips. Even if we'd tried boats they wouldn't have been fun, because Katy and her father would have been lying comatose on the deck. The apple didn't fall far from the tree, when it came to motion sickness. But on this same spring break trip to California, we had dinner on an old stern-wheeler, an expensive place where reservations were hard to get. We might as well have gone to McDonald's.

The boat hadn't sailed in decades and was safely moored to the shore, but before we'd even eaten our salads Katy lurched from the table to the restroom. Russ, looking a trifle green, said, "Yeah, it moved. I felt it, too." He picked at his dinner while the rest of us ate quickly. Katy took hers back to the motel in a Styrofoam carton.

On the way back home, we all enjoyed being rocked to sleep in our bunks and wakened by the sudden lack of motion. We pulled the curtain and saw snow as high as our windows, and workers swinging lanterns in the narrow space between the train and the snowbank.

Shawn loved the wall of vending snack machines in the lounge car.

Katy learned she got just as sick on trains as she did on cars, boats and planes.

Ah, yes, it was a family vehicle-related adventure. And it had a triple benefit ... three vehicle adventures crammed into one trip!

* Donna Scofield is a freelance writer whose articles, columns and short fiction stories have appeared in numerous national and regional magazines. The longtime Yakima resident is retired after working as a secretary and office manager in Yakima School District elementary schools. She has raised two sons and two daughters.

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