On the Road Again

Do you remember stretching out across the ledge behind the back seat on a family driving vacation in the days before mandatory seatbelts?

We can't go back to those carefree days of youth when gas-guzzling land yachts ruled the open highways, but driving to a distant destination can still be fun.

On Christmas Eve, our son Jay joined Julie and me as we challenged the traffic jams of greater Los Angeles en route to Salt Lake City, where we were scheduled to pick up daughter Amy and her boyfriend approximately 24 hours later.

Our original plan had been to miss the traffic by leaving around 3 AM on Christmas Day, but we decided to schedule a break along the way, eventually calling it a night in St. George, Utah.

It certainly took a lot of pressure off the drive.  Our room at the Crystal Inn came with a free breakfast, bringing the net cost of the stop for a good night's sleep down considerably...well, not actually that much, because road breakfast for us usually comes off the Dollar Menu at McDonald's.  We did, however, definitely enjoy our freshly made waffles, fruit and Cappuccinos as a change of pace.

As a boy, I didn't fully appreciate the grandeur and scope of our beautiful country through the car's windshield, but now I see miracles everywhere I look, from God's natural formations to humanity's bountiful harvests and impressive outposts of civilization. 

Morning in St. George, Utah

We reached Salt Lake City an hour early, giving us time to visit the Mormon Temple, which we'd heard about for years but never stopped to see.  We could hear some distant music and thought it might be a rehearsal of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, though most likely it was just music playing over the speaker system behind the locked doors.

Wandering the grounds among the impressive churches, we found a life sized Nativity Scene, complete with shepherds and nomads on the periphery.

It's really worth seeing if you happen to be in Salt Lake City at Christmastime, and getting to SLC airport from downtown couldn't have been easier.

After no-frill flights that ping-ponged them from New York to San Francisco and back to Salt Lake City, Amy and Lukas were more interested in food than returning to the Nativity Scene with us, so we headed to one of our favorite dining spots for road trips: McDonald's.  While Lukas, whose parents certify organic foods for a living, may not have been thrilled by this choice, he seemed to enjoy his hamburger.  We knew we would soon be feasting nightly on my sister Darlene's fabulous homemade family meals.

To reach our final destination of Big Sky Montana that night, we needed to get back on the road again quickly, which is a great justification for regularly choosing quick-service McDonald's.

A far cry from the spacious family sedan of my youth, our little Ford Escape nonetheless delivered us safely along the occasionally snowy roads, through intermittently diminished visibility and always tricky speed traps.

The next day, daughter Gina, her husband Laszlo and their daughter Emma arrived from New York.  They had been scheduled to get there a day earlier, but airport congestion resulted in the airline buying them off their flight for $3,000 plus food and lodging for a night in Chicago, which they took, essentially paying for their trip.  I'll never understand airline business models.

We enjoyed an amazing vacation together, frequently hosted by my sister Darlene, her husband Brooks and their son BG3, who live in a deluxe resort further up the mountain from Big Sky Meadow where we stayed.

In addition to great family dinners, we did a lot of skiing and talking, plus some time playing Bridge and a very long game of darts.  Plus, we celebrated a lovely Christmas together when we had all arrived on December 26.

Flashback: Shreddy, Jay, Leos and Santa on Christmas, 2014

The milestone event of our vacation turned out to be Emma learning to ski.  My brother-in-law Brooks, who has taught many people to ski over his remarkable life, recommended I buy a connecting strap of some kind for the tips of Emma's skis so that she would find it easier to hold a pizza-shape wedge.

The internet is terrific, and I easily found Lucky Bums Fall Line Easy Wedge.  I'm embarrassed to say that upon opening the package in Big Sky, I couldn't intuitively figure out how to tighten them to Emma's skis, which perhaps indicates why this simple, inexpensive and wonderful ski-teaching apparatus receives only 3 1/2 stars in reviews.

Fortunately, Brooks quickly tightened them down by twirling the buckle, and it indeed made it easier for Emma to hold a wedge and stop her skis from separating in a way that could otherwise lead to injury. In looking around the slopes, no one else, including kids getting private ski lessons, had those straps, and it made a big difference.

While searching for the Easy Wedge, I came across a great video series on teaching children to ski, which gives step-by-step lessons that should work for most toddlers to grade-schoolers.

How did I do teaching my granddaughter to ski? I wish I could say I nailed it, and we bonded for a lifetime.  That wasn't the case, but it all worked out great.  She went with her daddy and Aunt Amy to Big Sky's East Slope Outdoors, where we've been going for years and they received friendly, knowledgeable advice on exactly what to get, including a helmet, with the ski rentals being our main present for her so she wouldn't need to carry anything home (yes, Nana and I did send a couple of toys to her house in New York earlier).  Great Aunt Darlene had purchased lots of wonderful ski clothing to supplement the skiwear her parents had packed.

Most importantly, Emma arrived with the right attitude.  She was excited to learn to ski and had zero self doubt.  Her daddy took her up the conveyor-belt Magic Carpet and down the little beginner slope again and again.  As Brooks later commented, Emma was a natural, having fun with zero fear and doing great as a beginner.

When I took a turn as her primary teacher the next day, my objective was simple: teach Emma to stop.

Emma had in her mind that she was already fully prepared for the big mountain and objected to my saying she had to learn to stop first, and while I thought I told her correctly, I simply wasn't the right teacher.

That turned out to be my sister.  Emma and Darlene already had a strong bond formed over the love of Darlene's dog Little Teddy and fashion, but Darlene also did such an excellent job that her husband Brooks, who definitely would know, said she probably couldn't teach anyone else, because the resort doesn't allow professional ski instructors on the slopes except those within their own ski school.

Darlene was skiing backwards, giving Emma visual clues to stop, go and turn which she followed exactly.  Soon, they were on the big mountain, with Emma going faster and faster.

Proving she is still a little girl, when Shreddy the Yeti, a sort of Disney character on skis, appeared on the slopes, Emma became demonstrably thrilled. 

All too soon, Emma reluctantly returned to New York, informing everyone we could now call her Ski Master Emma.

When it was time for Amy to fly home, we headed to Bar 3, a Belgrade restaurant and brewery on the way to the Big Sky Airport. It reminds me of the kind of place my parents would stop when I was a child, with a casual atmosphere and delicious food, though my parents didn't drink alcohol. If you ever find yourself in Belgrade or Bozeman, check out Bar 3.

We had the Spirit of San Antonio, a family meal with pulled pork, beef brisket, chicken, four kinds of barbecue sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, fried okra and green chili cheese grits, plus a couple of great happy hour appetizers.   It was fantastic, including the Outlaw Nitro Stout and other fresh brews, which cost only
$3 during happy hour.

Jay, Julie and I stuck around a couple of days longer in our mountain paradise.  After skiing most of the last day, we started our drive home. stopping for the night at another Crystal Inn, this one in Brigham City, Utah, for a relaxing stay including an excellent breakfast.

We figured finishing our drive home on Saturday would avoid big traffic jams out of Las Vegas which would be inevitable on Sunday. 

Wrong. 

Our navigation program told us to get off the freeway to take a side road from Vegas to Primm, and that worked great for 99% of that stretch. The merge back to the freeway, however, was a full-blown mess.  Fortunately, we had a pack of M&Ms stowed away for just such an emergency, and occasional jolts of chocolate, sugar and peanuts (probably the most perfectly balanced food of all beneath the candy-coated shell), we survived.

We weren't out of the traffic by any means, but eventually we made it to Victorville and the loving arms of In-and-Out Burger.

No, traveling by car isn't perfect, but with the right attitude, it's not bad.  Our son Jay commuted a couple of years from the San Fernando Valley to Santa Monica, during Carmageddon, where he learned that becoming upset at the occasional jerks who cut you off does you no good.

Sometimes, you just have to chill out and listen to the music.  Think about it this way: it's much better than covered wagons where a family might make it 10 miles in a day without some kind of disaster, if they were lucky.

Is driving as relaxing as cruising?

Definitely not, but then again, even if you aren't going to a destination far from water routes, you might want to take a drive to catch a cruise, in which case you should learn to find pleasure on the road again. You might as interpret the experience as a good-natured adventure rather than a stressful drama.

P.S. The title of this blog, "On the Road Again," reminds me of maneuvers I took when in the Air Force, where some guys stuffed the juke box with quarters in order to play that song (linked above) repeatedly for a couple of hours, making them laugh loudly each time it started and causing the disdain of many others.

My nephew did a 21st Century reversal on this gag that had us all laughing in stiches.  A few months ago, BG3 bought his mom Amazon Echo, a voice-activated computer interface. Darlene has become accustomed to giving it commands such as, "Alexa, set a timer for fifteen minutes."  Alexa can look up information on the internet and even play songs licensed by Amazon.  Hoping to get my daughter Amy to sing "Baby, It's Cold Outside," which she had sung with a friend to win the talent show at UCONN a few years ago, Darlene said, "Alexa, play 'Baby It's Cold Outside.'"

Unknown to the rest of us, BG3 was overriding Darlene's verbal requests with his own keyboarded requests to Alexa, causing songs from the Beatles' "White Album" and other incorrect songs to play.  It took us quite a few hilarious minutes to realize what was happening, camouflaged by BG3 occasionally yelling something like, "Alexa, play a commie song," and then playing "Back in the USSR."