vacation – Waite for it…

I’m a summer kind of person. While most of the people around me in Florida are complaining about the heat, I’m enjoying the warmer weather. I love the feel of the sun on my skin, getting sweaty while walking or working outdoors, and warming up after I’ve left a frigid air conditioned room. I know, I might feel differently about this if I cut lawns all day or roofed houses. Maybe not. I’ve always like summer.

A newsletter recently asked its readers to share their favorite summer memory. Summers are when there’s no school and families often take vacations. I have some great summer memories.

In junior and senior high school, my music teacher directed a summer band program, open to anyone of any age who wanted to come and play. We weren’t preparing for a concert. We got to play a lot of different music. Early on, you got to play with the big kids, musicians who were much better than you. When older, you got to show the noobs how it was done. It was just a lot of fun and the days and weeks were never long enough.

I spend most of my high school and college summers working concessions at Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia. That meant I got to see a whole season of home games and get paid for it. Most of the time, I was a cashier on a level that looked out over the field from behind home plate. Customers came in-between innings, so we got to watch most of the game. Oh, and eat whatever mediocre stadium food we wanted.

One year, instead of taking us away on vacation, my dad put up a swimming pool in the backyard. Our yard was a hill, so we first had to level out an area. I think the was only about twelve feet across and maybe three feet deep. Not olympic-sized, but we didn’t care. My brother, sister, and I spent a lot of that and the next few summers in that pool.

Band camp before my senior year in high school is burned into my memory, too. That was the first year of a week-long sleep-over camp devoted entirely to preparing a halftime show for the fall. Music and marching all day, volleyball games in the off times, and way too little adult supervision in the cabins. Perfect formula for summer memories.

I have one negative summer memory. I was in fourth or fifth grade, and my dad took us to Ocean City, New Jersey for a week of vacation. At that time and in that place (suburban Philadelphia), families vacationed at the Jersey shore. He didn’t even get to pick the week. He got vacation when his company shut down for two weeks.

Anyway, my parents enrolled us in a vacation bible school that week to get us out of their hair every morning. In hindsight, they were geniuses. But in the moment, we thought it was cruel to drop us off with a bunch of strangers while they enjoyed their vacation. That VBS was actually a two-week program, so we got off easy. I know how exhausting one week is. I can’t even imagine doubling that!

In the summer, families get to spend more time together, and I’ll bet that’s what forges some of our best memories.

My dad always got two weeks of vacation when I was growing up in suburban Philadelphia. Though we kids had three months off from school in the summer, dad only got two weeks when the company he worked for shut down, usually in July.

We didn’t always go away, but when we did, it was usually to the Jersey shore for at most a week. We usually stayed at a motel in Ocean City, which we three kids thought was just the greatest thing in the world. It’s only an hour-and-a-half drive from where we lived, but it seemed to take forever. The windows were open because the car had no AC. And of course we routinely fought over who had to sit in the middle. No one wanted to sit on the “hump.” Our days were mostly spent on the beach, digging in the sand, building castles and getting sunburnt. My dad always swam pretty far out, but we didn’t roam too far from shore. Or, we would roam the boardwalk, begging for ice cream, saltwater taffy or miniature golf. We would go out for one nice fish dinner while we were there.

One year, my mom found a nearby church that had vacation bible school the same week we were there. She wasted no time getting us signed up and out of her hair every morning. If I remember correctly, it was actually a two-week program, but we only attended for five days. My memories of that week are vague but positive, so we must have had fun.

One year we headed out the other direction and spent a few days at Hershey Park. Before the days of big amusement parks, the rides here were a big deal. Plus, you got to tour the actual chocolate factory, which I thought was the best part.

A family vacation that really stands out is from the summer of 1971. I was confirmed that spring, turned 14 that July, and would have been a high school freshman that fall. We began with a drive to Wilmington, NC where my dad’s older brother Thomas lived. (No AC, windows open, fighting over seats in the blue Ford Falcon station wagon.) The beaches were white, wide and gorgeous. We got to see the fabric mill where Uncle Tommy worked. Operating at full capacity back then, I remember all the colors of spinning spools of thread and the deafening sound of the looms weaving yard after yard of fabric. Another vivid highlight of Wilmington was touring the battleship North Carolina. You could sit and pivot in an antiaircraft gun, stand way up in the bridge and pose for pictures beside some of the huge guns.

From there we drove up the Outer Banks of North Carolina, including two ferries. At the top of the Outer Banks we spent time at Kitty Hawk and the Wright Brothers Museum. From there we spent a couple of days at Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown, VA before heading home. We desperately but futilely tried to convince dad to take the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel home. Instead we went via Washington, DC.

A few years before that, instead of taking a vacation trip, my dad used the money to buy a pool for out backyard. It seemed huge back then, but I think it was only twelve feet across and three feet deep. We all helped dig yards and yards of dirt from the top of the hill so we had a level circle for the pool. It wasn’t always warm, but we swam, jumped, snorkeled and splashed the next few summers. It was definitely worth staying home.

Tag: vacation

Summer memories

Family vacation!

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