Speaking of feeling like school's out, I always get a bit antsy at the beginning of summer, because for most of my life school has indeed let me out ("FREEDOM!"), and I miss that. Often the family took off on that year's big summer vacation shortly thereafter -- on the very same afternoon we got home, once. Summer is the time to go driving across the country in a motorhome, camping in the mountains and visiting national parks and monuments both famous and obscure.

This gives me an idea -- I may put up a "family summer vacations" section on regulus.org and do a full illustrated summary. Because from 1983 onward, when bro and I got our disc cameras, I have thorough, even too much, coverage of them all. Also dating from 1983, not coincidentally, is the traditional family joke/eye-roll about me and pictures of squirrels. Whaddaya want, I was eleven. Squirrels are cute.

1970s: sporadic memories of trips to Sequoia, Joshua Tree, other places. There was a weekend train trip to Santa Barbara when I was three, while little bro was present but not out and about, if you follow; my most vivid memory of the trip is my utter abject fear that my cousins, wandering round on the tracks, would be flattened by a train that would suddenly race out of nowhere. (They weren't.) I also remember that due to little bro, I couldn't sit in Mama's lap.

1981: Christmas with extended family for a week in a rented condo at Mammoth. I managed to completely miss little bro's accidental death-defying sled stunt.

1983: about five days in Yosemite, with new disc cameras for the children, who were at this time blissfully unaware of the abysmally crappy quality of resulting photographs. Many squirrels disappeared into many wide-angle, squirrel-brown, grainy forest floor landscapes.

1984: our first trip without our beloved Toyota Chinook camper; bro and I had outgrown the pull-out shelf bed. We rented a bigger motorhome -- not one of those rock-n-roll tour bus monsters, just a twentyish-foot bed-over-the-cab style thing. In it we made a three-week tour of the Southwest.

1985: our marvelous wonderful grandparents buy a motorhome (of similar style to the rented one) both for their own use and to loan to the grandchildrens' families. First, a shortish trip to Kings Canyon, where bro got stung by a nasty bug just before we left for home. Later in August, we inspected central-northern California's gold country, standing ruefully on the great stump of a sequoia tree that had been cut and shipped east in pieces for display at some world's fair in the 1800s. 'Twas said on its sign that after analysis of the growth rings, they think it had been the fastest growing tree in the grove and might have been the biggest sequoia anywhere by now if it hadn't been CUT DOWN. SNORT.

1986: I get a real 35mm Pentax for my birthday. Weekend trip to Catalina Island. Then, a return to Yosemite. Trails are hiked. Squirrels are photographed.

1987: the great Yellowstone (and much more) expedition. Our usual family luck held, in going the year before the great fires that swept through Yellowstone the following summer.

1988: Death Valley? I think? Ack, the memory, it goeth. I'll have to check this one.

1989: the Great Cross Country Trip. This was the summer before my senior year in high school, and before bro's eighth grade, so we figured it was our last chance for a really all-out family vacation (and a bit of education for our upcoming government classes). We drove in the motorhome from Los Angeles across the middle of the country all the way to Washington, D.C., up to Maine, and back. Sadly, from about Maryland to Cape Cod, the roll of film in my camera was not advancing, and so none of the pictures I took around New York City exist.

hoo. what an aimless spilling of information. Exhibit A of how I dream of vacations, this time of year.

Happily, I will get my vacation fix this weekend, driving up to San Francisco to visit some folks. It wouldn't be summer without traveling, somewhere. So, updating is likely not to happen from about Friday morning through Tuesday. FYI. and YAY!

copyright 2003 carrie lynn king.