And Sometimes It Fails

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

There are vacations you fantasize about, that you think will go a certain way.  In your head they are idyllic, and successful, they are worthy of bragging to your friends about.  They might (in the case of my most recent delusion) seem to imply you are adventurous and creative.  This was the case with our Fourth of July vacation to Yosemite.  I have been doing a lot of camping, and on a trip last month to Yosemite Arun and I camped next to a couple in a large RV.  I hadn’t thought much about RVs in general.  I had always considered them ungainly and sluggish things that were perpetually holding up traffic.  At campsites, they weren’t much better – generators buzzing, roofs blocking the scenery.  But it seemed to me one morning as Arun and I huddled at the picnic table making breakfast, that maybe an RV trip might make for a good family vacation; like camping but enhanced. The kids were always playing in my car, this would seem to them like a house on wheels.  And so over July 4th weekend, Arun, Trent (a friend of ours) and the kids piled into a rented RV and made our way to Yosemite.

What I hadn’t counted on was how much an RV looks like a house.  The kids were perplexed as to why, if we were in fact in a house, I couldn’t get up to fetch them juice from the RV fridge while hurtling down highway 680.  “I can’t,” I’d say, “we’re driving.”  And they’d look around like, then how come there are beds in here? My hope of playing Go Fish and Connect 4 on the long drive disintegrated the second we took our first turn – the Connect 4 pieces sliding off the table and pinging all over the RV floor.  Once there, the kids discovered the door of the RV had a little sliding window, and for hours they played drive-through – snapping the window back and forth, shoving imaginary burritos made of twigs and dust through it. We’d come all the way to one of the most spectacular places in the world and the kids were playing Taco Bell.  Because we got there late, a result of Ivy hiding the RV keys, there wasn’t much to do that night but eat dinner and go to bed.  By then the RV was filthy.  Looking around at the fine layer of campsite dust, the spilled juice box, the melted cheese stick, I realized RVs were not for small children,  they were for retired couples who diligently took their shoes off, swept the steps of their RV and put welcome mats outside.  They were not for six year olds.  And they sure as hell weren’t for a set of three year olds.

Then there was the RV stove.  When you are a marginal cook as I am, you feel somehow more adept while camping.  You’re using a camp stove after all so every meal comes with lower expectations.  No one is expecting chicken cordon blue.  A simple hot dog is gratefully received and a pancake seems like something of a miracle.  But when you forget the camp stove or it slips your mind because you have a stove in the RV anyway, you are once again cooking indoors – only this time with the addition of finicky burners and a sensitive smoke alarm.   The pancakes made on a camp stove when we camped a few weeks prior were delicious, whereas the RV stove pancakes, looked feeble and tasted rubbery.

Arun and I had spent the weeks leading up to the trip talking about RVs and trailers in general.  So presumptuous about how awesome the trip would be, we’d actually toyed with the idea of buying an RV, even going as far as to look at Silver Streams on eBay and craigslist.  It would be great, we thought, we could take it to Yellowstone, to the Grand Canyon, to Niagra Falls. What a learning experience for the kids, what an adventure!  But the first night as Arun and I lay in the stuffy RV that rocked like a boat when you so much as cleared your throat, Arun said to me:  “I might be over the Silver Stream thing.”  In the middle of the night, bears paid us a visit, knocking into Trent’s tent as the bear was shooed out of the campsite by a neighboring camper.  Five or six car alarms later and it was pretty much morning already.

We’d planned to leave Monday, but by Saturday morning I noticed the three of us dropping hints to one another about leaving early. Because we’d brought the RV, we were more limited by things to do, and a quick trip in the car up to Glacier Point or a drive to Bridal Veil falls was impossible.  So we decided to stay in the valley.  It took us all day Saturday to do one thing:  take the kids three shuttle stops to Yosemite Village where they whined their way through the museum.  I’d packed the RV with sandwich makings, fully intending to take the kids on a picnic to a meadow or by the banks of a stream.   But I’d been too tired after the bears and the car alarms and the rocking of the RV to even open the cooler, let alone assemble sandwiches and so once at Yosemite Village we went for pizza.  As we sat glassy eyed, waiting for the pizza to cool,  Hazel said: “Raise your hand if you’re exhausted.”  It was unanimous.

On the way back home the next day, I drove for a while – a harrowing experience if there’s so much as a breath of wind.  The kids hit each other and argued until at last they fell asleep.  When we stopped for dinner at a Fudruckers in Tracy, it appeared the worst was behind us.  But the kids wouldn’t eat and Ivy (who had glimpsed a little vending machine near the bathroom full of small toys encased in plastic bubbles) spent the whole dinner saying, “I want a toy”.   I told her that if she could eat some of her dinner I’d get her something.   She steadfastly refused and when we started getting ready to leave, I knew she wasn’t going to let it go.  “Toy?” she asked.  “Nope,” I said.  Arun and I exchanged a look, we knew what was coming.  He stood up and unbuckled her from the highchair.  “Go,” he told me.  But it was too late.  I picked her up and her legs were already bicycle kicking in the air.  She was a whirling dervish, screaming and flailing.  Accidentally or on purpose she punched me in the face.  People turned in their chairs to look as I made my way to the nearest door, hoping it wasn’t a fire exit.

Back in the parking lot after Ivy had exhausted herself, I got everyone buckled and we drove the rest of the way home.  When we finally passed Mountain View, I felt like crying with relief.  That night, as I put Hazel to bed, we talked about the trip.  She of course saw the whole thing through another set of eyes; to her it was a good time all around.  I brought up Ivy’s tantrum in the restaurant.  Hazel had been over near the bathrooms when it started and had witnessed it from a safe distance.  “What did you do,” I asked her, “when Ivy started screaming?”  She shrugged.  “I just pretended like I wasn’t with you guys.”

Trent: "Hazel, if you catch a squirrel, mom says you can keep him." Mom: "I'm going to kill you Trent."