Family Spring Break Trips of Yore

Spring Break to me usually means getting away to Florida. Ever since I can remember, it started with family trips in the Chevrolet station wagon from Chicagoland to Florida. We would always drive straight through, maybe making one stop overnight if Mom and Dad weren’t up to doing a non-stop run. We would head out the door at about 3:00 or 4:00 o’clock in the morning. I would be roused out of bed and carried down in my pajamas with “footies.” Mom created this mattress of foam, covered with a blue and purple plaid pattern material that would fit in the far back of the station wagon once the rear seat was folded down. Typically, me and my middle brother would be in the far back and my oldest brother would be spread across the seats in the middle. I always loved the day trips and seeing the countryside as we would drive down through Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. However, there is still one phrase that my parents, my oldest brother and I will never forget that my middle brother said one year as we were driving down: “It’s coming!” This would be reiterated twice with Mom saying, “What’s coming?” My brother never answered until “it” came. My brother’s breakfast never settled well with him and poor Mom’s white sweater that hung over her seat got the brunt of “it.” Every subsequent road trip my brother would be teased unmercifully.

In the early years, it was trips to Orlando and Walt Disney World. Our stays were prinarily at the Polynesian Village. As “contemporary” as the Contemporary Hotel was, it just didn’t seem like it had all that pizzazz, even in the early years. And the one thing I would always ask Mom and Dad is how the people could possibly sleep with the monorail always riding into the hotel “lobby”. The area was indeed somewhat like a subway station with the platforms and the ceiling went up about 8-10 stories.

This trip is also the trip that would teach me to never ride roller coasters ever again in my life. All five of us rode Space Mountain which I thought was going to be this fun ride as we walked in long lines past these models of astronauts, moons and planets behind plates of glass. “Oh cool!” would be my middle brother’s response. Then we would near the front of the line and from above me I would hear these screams of fear from the girls on the ride. Then yours truly started crying even before getting on the ride. To this day my parents claim I scratched the heck out of my father’s face and that I nearly fell out of the car. Evidently the cars were not as safety-designed as they are now. Thirty-four years later, I have yet to get on another one. And that isn’t good, considering I lived only miles from Great America where EVERYONE loved the roller coasters. “Oh, I’m not feeling very well” would be my excuse.

I can recall us three sons being subjected to wearing the same shirts and pants on the trips. It almost made it seem like we were on a parochial school road trip and we were wearing our uniforms. We were subjected to getting individual colored-pencil drawings of ourselves. We were all wearing light blue, short-sleeve polyester shirts that had a zipper front that went down to about the nipple area and the zipper had a “hoop” pull. I can still picture these drawings in vivid detail. My nose had such an inward curve in the drawing that I used to say it looked like a ski jump. However, I NEVER remember having a nose that looked like that. I asked Mom what “Rem” stood for that was signed in black pencil near my shirt, not knowing that those were the initials from the artist. A few days later we three sons were subjected to their last day of “identity theft” when we wore a tan shirt with two brown horizontal stripes in differing hues. These were not so bad as they were 100% cotton. Whew! I also remember a photo that Mom had taken of Dad and the three sons as we were in our bathing suits in ankle high water. We stood from tallest to shortest and we all posed flexing our muscles. I also happened to have an inflatable float ring around my waist. I stopped by Mom and Dad’s to find the photo album and scan the photo to share, but the album couldn’t be found. I couldn’t ask them where it may be because Mom and Dad are in……..yep, you guessed it……..Florida.

A subsequent family trip to Walt Disney World about 7 or 8 years later was when the EPCOT Center opened. We again stayed at the Polynesian Village. Only this was the newest part of the village with all new rooms that they added. And we three sons got to wear what we wanted. No more dressing like fraternal triplets.

Other family trips to Florida then headed to the west coast where Fort Myers was our destination. Mom and Dad said we didn’t need to see all the sights and sounds of Disney anymore. One year we stayed at the Pink Flamingo Resort and that was the year that I cut open my left knee after water tossed me against some boulders in the ocean. It was a huge cut where Mom and Dad first contemplated taking me to the hospital to get stitches. I almost wish they did. The alternative was that Dad POURED hydrogen peroxide all over the wound. You could hear my scream back in Chicago. Then a huge bandage was applied on one side of the wound and stretched to the other side so as to bring the two sides of the skin together and “close the wound.” It was also the vacation that I met a girl <gasp> who was also staying at the same resort. She was from Pennsylvania. We walked to the pier many times together. I admit this is weird, she “taught” me this poem about a bird that relieved itself in a person’s eye: “Birdie, birdie, in the sky, why’d you do that in my eye? Tastes like sugar, tastes like sap….Oh my God it’s birdie crap.” I can’t believe I just admitted to not only knowing this, but remembering it decades later.

Subsequent trips to Fort Myers were at the Holiday Inn where we did a lot of shell, sand dollar and sea urchin scavaging. Then we would take the shells back and if I am not mistaken, Mom or Dad would boil them in pots of water. Then Mom would later apply bleach to the sand dollars to whiten them up but not make them too fragile that they broke or crumbled. My middle brother also bought a sea monkey kit. I forget what they actually are.

Our last trip together as a whole family was when my oldest brother was probably about 19 and I was 13. That was the year that my middle brother was the rebel in the sun. The middle brother is practically an albino when it comes to his hair and fair skin. He ALWAYS would burn in the sun. After my mother insisted for the last time that he put on sunblock, he relented. And he carelessly “slapped” the sunscreen on his back without doing any massaging and spreading of it. That afternoon when he came in, not only was he burned, but there were streak burns with a few hands spotted on his back. He learned his lesson well.

There was one trip to Fort Myers with just my parents that I’ll never forget. It was as fun as any other vacation, with the exception of one fatal event that happened just offshore. Two friends were riding jet skis and one friend fell off and went under. And as that vacated jetski continued in a circular fashion (as is typical when it becomes unmanned), his friend rode his jet ski toward him and accidentally struck him. The friend was struck right at the jugular vein where he bled out quickly. Crowds gathered around the scene where rescue squad personnel demanded the beach towels of the onlookers. Mom didn’t like the fact that I was so close to the scene and suggested that we return to our room. Our room was up around the 9th or 10th floor and looked out toward the ocean. When looking down toward the scene of the accident, a very large pool of blood was seen in the water. It was the first time in my life (and I think my last?) that I had been at the scene of an accident where somebody lost their life right in front of me.

My college days often brought me down to the east coast and frequented the Fort Lauderdale strip. My most recent trip there had to have been in 2005. What I loved about the beach was that there was a section near Sebastian Drive that was always known as the “gay beach”. And almost directly west, across A1A Drive was a Hooters Restaurant. Go figure! Most guys were conversive on the beach and I rarely encountered guys who felt they were “too good for you.”

I was going to write about something short and sweet and that was about the news that ATA Airlines went bankrupt. They didn’t tell any of the employees about the impending doom and they actually were still taking reservations as of Wednesday. So there are a lot of people who were stranded at various airports throughout the country. Of all the years that I have been flying down to Florida, I had been flying ATA. Thank God I decided to vacation in San Francisco this year. Or else I may have been “grounded” on April 12th. I have a few excursions planned while out there, but if you have any recommendations as far as places to eat, places to see, photographic locales, etc. I’m willing to consider them.