Packed Like Sardines in A Tin

In just a few days, I go to Tahoe for my family’s annual vacation and I just can’t wait. I spend much of the year looking forward to Tahoe the way some people look forward to Christmas. How often do you get a chance to vacation somewhere beautiful with people you adore?

Tahoe is a true vacation. The goal of each day is to do as little as possible. There are no museums to visit or sights to see. We just eat, read, swim, play cards, watch the sunset, rinse and repeat.

The challenge at Tahoe is sharing space with 20 people since we cram as much of our ever-expanding family into one giant cabin. Cabin really isn’t the right word for the place, since it’s not at all rustic. Cabin also implies a smaller place and this one is massive. Initially built as a duplex, it has five bedrooms, five bathrooms, assorted sleeping alcoves, and two living rooms.

But even though there’s plenty of room for our big group, it’s still odd to go from living with the quiet Mr. WholeHog to living with a pack of my very loud relatives. And it’s strange to live with my parents again, and also my aunts, uncles, cousins, and now, increasingly, cousin’s kids. It is, as my grandfather used to say, an unusual combination.

We may be family, but we don’t all live the same way. We don’t have the same schedules. Some of us sleep in until noon (Brendan), while others (Mary Jo) get up early and, inexplicably, shuffle cards.

We eat different things as the extra-crowded fridge attests (low-fat milk and soy milk, pasture-raised meats and Oscar Meyer bologna). We have different ideas of what is clean and what is dirty, what should be recycled and what should be thrown away, what is too noisy and what is just right.

Even in the extra-large cabin, we get in each others’ way, especially in the kitchen where if you open the fridge, whoever is at the sink is stuck in the kitchen, and whoever wants to get to the garbage, say, has to wait. There’s also never enough hot water for all the showers, so we learn to brace ourselves for the shock of cold water in the shower, as someone else siphons off the hot water.

But mostly, living together is what makes Tahoe so fun. Everyone wanders down to the breakfast table when they wake up and we spend hours there, visiting with each new arrival and trading sections of the newspaper, while someone inevitably burns the toast. Often, we’re still at the breakfast table when lunch time rolls around, playing cards or deep in conversation.

Every night, after dinner, we all head down to the beach to watch the sun set behind the mountains and take our yearly family picture. From the picture, you can’t tell who had the cold shower, or who was woken up by the sound of shuffling cards. Instead, it just looks like a happy, if unusual, combination.

The Trip’s The Thing

I’m heading off on a vacation or what I hope will be vacation: a road trip with my parents and my sister up the Eastern edge of the country.

It’s a return to the trips of my childhood since all of our family “vacations” were road trips. This isn’t our first family trip since my sister and I left the nest (we took a shorter road trip around New England two years ago), but it may be the last.

Getting on the road again with my family is a bit of a gamble for me, since I didn’t particularly like our family car trips.

Our cars weren’t well equipped for the open road and neither was I. Since I get car sick from the slightest bend in the road and the family car overheated at the slightest incline, we spent a lot time on the side of the road, rather than on the road.

Many people have romantic ideas of a road trip, but I know the reality. I know what it’s like to blow a fan belt in Winnemucca, NV. Or to stand on the narrow shoulder on an exposed mountain pass because the car overheated.

Car trouble was at least a chance of pace, though. Mostly what I remember from our car trips was the boredom. Sitting in the back seat with ice chests tucked under my legs for hours. Rolling into a new town, hangry (that’s Tablehopper-speak for being so hungry you’re angry and my family frequently suffers from this ailment, especially on the road), and with no place to stay.

In hindsight, I can see that financially, road trips were my family’s only option. A nurse and a teacher with two kids and a mortgage can’t really afford to fly somewhere, stay in a decent hotel. So instead, we drove…and we camped.

Camping meant finding room for 4 sleeping bags, a decent-sized tent, and cooking equipment in the car (do I even have to say that it was a station wagon?). And it meant rolling into new towns dusty as the Joads and smelling like a camp fire.

This trip should be better.

It’s too far away to consider camping, Reed’s ginger chews help my car sickness, and our rental car is pretty much guaranteed to be in better shape than the old overheating station wagon.

But now, there are new concerns: my mother’s intense snoring, for example, and my father’s intense frugality. (While I like to try local restaurants when travelling, my dad would be perfectly happy to buy a 12-inch Subway sandwich and snack off that for 4 days straight). And then there’s my sister’s relatively recent refusal to eat animal products — and we’re not headed to a region known for their vegan cuisine.

I’m different, too. I’m used to living with Mr. WholeHog, who is decibels quieter than my family. I’m used to San Francisco’s 65 degree weather. (I’m seriously frightened of the heat and humidity we could encounter next week.) And I’m used to knowing where my food comes from.

Going on the road, for me, means having to let go of control and that doesn’t always come easily.

But it’s an adventure. As my grandfather famously said, “The trip’s the thing.”

We know where we are starting and ending our trip, but we’re leaving the middle stretch wide open. We hope to have some good meals, and assume we’ll have some crummy ones, too. We’ll drink weaker coffee, swim in a warmer ocean and breathe a thicker air. We’ll try to see how the other side of the country — geographically and politically — lives.

Bookmarked: Dad Blogs

I meant to write something for Father’s Day. But I ended up spending Father’s Day with my dad. Instead of writing a post, we went on an SF neighborhood walk.

Neighborhood walks are one of my favorite activities and my dad loves anything that is outside and might count as exercise. The idea is to head out in any direction with no plan in mind. And what you inevitably find is streets you’d never heard of, laden with what may be examples of your new favorite (or least favorite) architecture. Ideally, we happen upon a new view of the city or one of SF’s famed stairways, but if nothing else, we usually end up surprised by how all these little pieces of the city fit together. We ended our walk near his favorite SF taqueria where we loaded up on carnitas tacos.

When my parents went home, I sat down to write about my dad and ended up with pages and pages of text that wasn’t really in any publishable form. I had lists of the funny things he’s worn (fanny packs), the funny things he continues to wear (netted hats), and a list of words or phrases he’s repeated endlessly to mostly his own enjoyment — this list includes quotes from Pulp Fiction, a commercial jingle or two, and a few Neil Young imitations. (This list is also now posted on my fridge and it makes me laugh every time I look at it.) But I didn’t end up with anything that I felt adequately represented my dad.

I’m thinking about dads a lot again, a few weeks after Father’s Day, because I’ve started reading a few blogs written mostly by stay at home dads. Head on over and drink the parenting kool-aid:

Cry It Out chronicles the adventures of an SF dad. I should admit that a good friend of mine knows this couple quite well and I think I’ve met them once, pre-child. But the blog makes you feel like they are your new best friends.

I started reading a bit of Sweet Juniper a few months ago when the family’s super-modern Detroit apartment was featured on a design blog I like (Designsponge? Apartment Therapy?) but I come back to this site for a hit of the parenting stories.

These are no ordinary dads. Mike learned to sew so that he could make his daughter clothes (following a mortifying experience of his daughter appearing at the playground in the same ironic $30 onesie as another kid). Dutch makes his daughter cardboard cars per her request and he responded to her request to see a list of people (real and fictional) pooping (this is by far the best thing I’ve seen today!).

Tahoe

In only a few weeks, I’ll head off to Tahoe. It’s my very favorite vacation of the year. People think I’m crazy but I prefer Tahoe to just about anywhere.

There’s Tahoe itself, with its incredible water – cold, clear and clean — and its lovely clean sandy bottom instead of the muck you usually wade through in most lakes.

There’s the view: when you swim in Tahoe, you look around and realize that you’re in a huge basin surrounded on all sides by mountains and forests. (If you look towards Tallac, you can maintain this idyllic sensibility. If you veer slightly north, you’ll find hideous reminders that part of Tahoe is in Nevada: the top of Harrah’s casino peeking out of the trees. You must never admit that you saw this. In order to love Tahoe like I do, you must ignore the fact that part of Tahoe is in Nevada).

There’s that pine-y, Christmas-y smell.

And there are the Meadows: we stay in an area that has been somewhat sheltered from development. The meadows have been preserved. The roads were all dirt until just last year. The speed limit is still only 15 mph so it made for an ideal place for my cousins and I to learn how to drive.

Photo from www.tahoemeadows.org

The cabins in this area are generally rustic although that’s changed in the last 15 years. There are now some icky McMansion cabins with greasy owners, but these mingle with the old school cabins where half of the cabin’s square footage is a screened-in porch.

The Meadows also have two beaches that are only for those staying in the area. The beaches are only short walk from the cabin so you can blissfully go back and forth all day long.

Photo from www.tahoemeadows.org

But mainly in Tahoe, there’s family. This year marks my family’s 40^th year at the lake. My mom is one of seven and there are 10 of us cousins – many now married, some with kids.

And Tahoe is one reason why my family is so tight. Each year as kids, we spent 2 weeks with our aunts, uncles and cousins at the lake so we know each other. And if we’ve lost touch as we grew up, each year at Tahoe, we have a chance to get reacquainted.

Tahoe is leisurely mornings on the deck of the cabin where you fight with your family members over the crossword puzzle and the jumble (we are serious word game people). It’s swimming in the lake with my sister and trying to convince my cousin’s that it’s not too cold for a dip. It’s strolling back to the cabin still wet from the lake when we’re hungry or if the wind picks up. It’s my aunts playing Scrabble on the beach in the afternoon. Ending every day with a glass of wine at the beach for sunset and playing cards with my cousins late into the night, until we’re so tired we’re punchy and we laugh until we cry.