Much of my traveling these days is tied to my interest in photography. My wife and I both love nature, so we often seek out places rich in scenic beauty or abounding in wildlife. Favorites include Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, Fla., the Southwest U.S., and New Hampshire’s White Mountains.
But there are also memories of vacations from childhood and on through the rearing of a family and into the empty-nester stage of life:
Most vivid memory of a childhood vacation: Every family has at least one member who could be colorfully described as a “character.” In my family it was my mom’s father. It’s family legend how he went with my parents on their honeymoon. (It’s a wonder they ever had any kids.)
Each year our big summer vacation was to drive from our home in Springfield, Ohio, to Crooked Lake, a small lake near the town of Delton in southwest Michigan. There were always certain rituals on this trip: Stopping at one specific gas station for frozen Zero candy bars; eating lunch at Win Schuler’s.
This particular year, my grandfather accompanied us to Michigan because he was living with us — a result of getting a divorce at roughly age 80 from his third wife (he outlived the first two). I was riding in the back seat of our ’54 Chevy. My grandfather was back there, too, talking almost non-stop as he critiqued the driving skills of almost everyone on the road: “Look at that damned fool,” he snorted, pointing to the car ahead of us on the two-lane road. “We’re driving 50 miles an hour and he’s two blocks ahead of us. He’s doing 100.”
My dad, a generally placid individual, listened to this prattle as it went on and on and on. Finally, he snapped. He steered the Chevy to the shoulder of the road. There was fire in his eyes as he jerked around in the seat and looked at my grandfather. “Look, buster,” he growled, tapping his finger against my grandfather’s chest for emphasis. “Either shut your trap or get out and walk!” There was dead silence in the car. Then my dad turned around and pulled back on the highway, enjoying the sudden silence.
Not long after our return from vacation, my mom got her dad and stepmother back together and they remarried. Vacations were never the same after that.
Biggest idiot encountered while on vacation: It was a little after dawn, and fog still hung in patches around the willows at Oxbow Bend, a stretch of stream just off the main road through Grand Teton National Park. The area is a good one for sighting moose, and when my wife and I saw a van with South Carolina plates pulled to the side of the dirt road, we figured we’d hit paydirt. We had. A very large bull moose lay in the wet grass only a hundred feet or so off the road. The family from the van — Mom and Dad and a couple of kids — stood watching and chattering. I grabbed my tripod and camera out of the car, set up and started taking pictures, far enough back from the moose to keep from bothering him.
I’d snapped off only a few shots when the man from the van, now more interested in my camera and big lens than the moose, volunteered, “Wanna see ‘im standin’ up?” Without waiting for an answer, he strode across the wet grass toward the moose, waving his arms. The moose, which probably stood 6 feet and weighed at least a thousand pounds, lurched to its feet. I was picturing what a somewhat overweight South Carolinian might look like being tossed into the air by the moose’s massive rack of antlers. But the moose just looked at the man, gave a snort and ambled into the willows. I seconded his snort.
Best native food: Was it the food or the folks who made those Jamaican patties taste so good? On our second visit to Montego Bay, my wife and I ventured across the road from the Holiday Inn in search of the little meat pies that are a popular part of the island country’s cuisine. We were welcomed at a nondescript little outdoor bar/eatery that catered more to the local cabbies than to the tourists who wandered the shops next door. But there were no patties.
“No problem, mon,” said Derrick, a local we had encountered earlier in the day as he handed out discount coupons for a nearby nightspot. Derrick hopped in his car and soon returned with foil-wrapped packages of patties from one of the food shacks that sit aside the road to Montego Bay.
Though the food had come from another eatery, there was “no problem, mon” with us devouring it in the little bar. And we passed a few hours with Derrick, eating, drinking Red Stripes and talking about the Chicago “Bools” that he was familiar with from satellite TV. No meal was ever better.
A bad vacation, but a good story: Picture this — one adult male in his mid-30s, five kids roughly 8 to 14, a car that goes “reer-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r, reer-r-r-r-r-r-r” when the shift lever is put in drive, but it doesn’t drive. Now place this group in a beautiful national park — but 50 miles from the nearest car repair facilities and 50 miles from the campground. Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco. I left my transmission in Grand Teton National Park.
The time was the late ’70s, and the plan was for my family of five and my brother’s family of four to take our camping trailers to Yellowstone National Park. Once there, I offered to take all of the kids horseback riding in Grand Teton. We never saw a horse. What we saw instead was a lot of a gas station in Grand Teton after our station wagon’s transmission gave up the ghost, apparently a victim of hauling our camping trailer up those long hills on the way to Yellowstone.
I called AAA, which dispatched a wrecker from Jackson, Wyo., 50 miles away. I checked on the kids and found them amusing themselves by pitching pennies, seeing who could get their penny closest to the gas pump island. I called Yellowstone and explained our predicament to a helpful ranger, who vowed to send someone to our joint campsite to tell my brother we were stranded.
The kids kept pitching pennies. AAA arrived, hooked up the car and left. There was more penny pitching. Finally, as the afternoon waned, my brother arrived and took us back to the campsite and eventually back to our mom’s home in Cody, near Yellowstone.
The next few days were a blur. They culminated with another drive through Yellowstone and Grand Teton to retrieve the car so we could head back home. Our vacation was a shambles, and my Visa card was smoking. But, like many disasters, it was a vacation we still talk about to this day. You can bet your lucky penny on that.
Most ghostly vacation spot: We citizens of the United States tend to think chauvinistically that our section of the North American continent didn’t really exist until our European forebears graced this soil with their settlements. The view is even narrower here in the Midwest, where most of our history dates from the 1800s. But the ghosts of our country’s true beginnings walk the American Southwest in places with names like Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins. For it’s in sites like these that we can view the ruins of the natives who peopled that area from as early as 600 AD until their mysterious disappearance in the 1300s. Touch the remains of a wall in Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northwest New Mexico and you’re touching a stone placed there by an Anasazi mason a thousand years ago. Sit quietly in a kiva at the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado and you can almost hear the pounding of drums and chants of ancient worshipers. The spirits live here.
This is a vacation? Not many people would choose to vacation by bus. For 500 miles. With a group of high school kids. But there we were — my wife and I, along with a dozen or so other “band parents” — headed to Winnipeg, Manitoba, with our son and daughter and a hundred of their best musical friends for a high school marching band competition. It wasn’t always an easy trip. There were some threats and some yelling and some tears during those four days. But there were also the jokes and the pranks, the smiles and the hugs, the memories that will never fade. And as we sat in the bleachers that last night and watched our kids — all 100 of our kids — go through a marching routine that we had seen a dozen times before, we knew they had never done it better. Eyes filled with tears and hearts swelled with pride as a vacation like no other played to a close.
Most interesting encounter with the culture: Jamaica has the reputation of a place where tourists get hassled a lot by the locals, who want to sell you drugs, braid your hair or outfit you in a T-shirt. That can discourage many from ever venturing outside their resort. And that’s too bad. A few years ago, my wife and I were vacationing at Wyndham Rose Hall, outside Montego Bay. Adjacent to the Wyndham was a ramshackle craft market that I ventured into one afternoon. The area by the sea was made up of a collection of free-standing shacks, many containing the usual items you see, most of which probably came over on the boat from somewhere in Asia.
I was attracted to the shack of a young man who, though he had the same sales spiel as every other entrepreneur in this community, was unique. He was actually a craftsman. Scattered around his shack were woodcarvings in various stages of completion. As I looked at his carvings, mostly of animals and fish, he was putting the finishing touches on a giraffe about a foot tall. I liked the giraffe, and so the carver and I did the obligatory haggling dance, eventually striking a deal for $6 U.S.
I fetched us each a Red Stripe from one of the shacks that sold beer and food and we talked while he finished carving and rubbed wax into the wood. He told me about his work as a carver and as part of the hired help at the Wyndham. I told him a little about my life. Too soon, the carving was completed. I regretted I hadn’t brought my camera with me. But I can still see him at work, his hands caressing the wood.
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Meet the staff
Phil Marty has been an editor for the Tribune’s Travel section since April 1998. Prior to that, he was supervising editor of the suburban Tempo sections for several years and had worked at a number of newspapers in Iowa. Though his primary duties involve editing the writings of others, he also is an occasional contributor to the section in both words and photos. Marty has a lengthy list of potential vacation spots, both domestic and foreign, and he says that when the Grim Reaper comes calling, his response will be, “Come back later. I’m not finished.” His e-mail address is pamarty@tribune.com
