Traveling in Relative Comfort : There’s No Map to Success, but Realistic Expectations Will Help Keep Your Family Vacations on the High Road

The summer travel season is about to begin, and it’s time for parents who are preparing for family trips to give themselves a reality check:

* Do you envision your school-age children sitting quietly in the back seat for hours at a time, enjoying the scenery and waiting patiently to reach the rest stops along your driving route?

* Do you picture them asking intelligent questions and listening intently as you explain the significance of historical sites?

* Do you see yourself putting the little ones to bed early and enjoying uninterrupted, private time with your mate at the end of a long day of sightseeing?

* Do you anticipate spending so much “quality time” with your children during your vacation that you’ll no longer feel guilty about being away from them when you return to your demanding work schedule?

* Do you expect to come home from your family trip feeling rested and wishing it hadn’t gone so quickly?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may want to postpone your trip until you get a better grip on what traveling with children is really like.

It might help to watch “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” a film in which a family of four encounters one disaster after another in a drive across the country, only to find that the amusement park that was to be the highlight of the vacation has been closed for renovations.

After enduring hours of back-seat bickering between two preteens, getting lost in a dangerous inner-city neighborhood, fighting off a vicious dog and spending a night in a barely habitable roadside tent camp, the idealistic father played by Chevy Chase puts his arm around his wife and says, “In spite of all the little problems, it really is fun, isn’t it?”

“No,” she says. “But with every new day there’s hope.”

Parents who don’t expect a family trip to be nonstop fun have the best hope of making it an experience that both they and their children will want to remember.

“If you’re planning a perfect vacation, you’re asking for a lot of disappointment,” cautions Andrea Heiden, a Newport Beach marriage, family and child counselor. “A vacation itself is stressful. Anybody can get cranky with a change in routine.”

Parents who acknowledge that travel can be unsettling for everyone--and that there’s an unpredictable side to even the most well-planned trips--are less likely to overreact when things go wrong. They’re also better able to be patient and understanding with over-excited, overtired little ones--and to resist the impulse to cut their trip short when they start dreaming about how peaceful it is back at the office.

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Janet Hamilton, a Newport Beach mother of three, says she’s learned to expect trouble at the beginning of a driving trip because of the chaos, anxiety and excitement involved in getting ready to leave home.

Her children, ages 13, 7 and 5, are wired by the time the trip begins, and then they start to feel a letdown when they realize there’s a long journey ahead. During the first day or two of travel, as they adjust to the gap between their expectations and reality, they do a lot of arguing and shoving, while Hamilton wonders, “Why are we doing this? Why did we bring them?” But then the kids--who stretch out with their dog in the back of the van and watch videos and play games--settle into their travel routine, and they all begin to enjoy the stops along the way.

Hamilton makes a point of not overselling their final destination.

“It’s a common trap to build up a destination so much that it never meets expectations. The family should see travel time on a driving trip as a time to have fun interacting with each other and notice the little things. If the destination turns out to be wonderful, think of that as a bonus,” she says, noting that spontaneous side trips often turn out to be the highlights of her family’s trips.

Janice Tanner, an Irvine psychotherapist, notes that if parents can relax and enjoy the journey, their children will be more mellow on the road. She recalls how uptight she felt on some of her childhood vacations.

“I remember my father driving all night and getting so tired that he was going over the bumps in the road (divider). I was very scared. My mom kept saying, ‘Let’s just stop and rest.’ But he was driving himself because he wanted us to have this perfect vacation. And all I could think was, ‘I want my daddy to be OK, and I don’t want anything bad to happen.’ ”

Her best travel memories are the laid-back times when her family would laugh and sing around a campfire at night. “As a child, it’s the time you have with others that means most,” she says.

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Heiden agrees that bonding is the big payoff of successful family vacations.

“The fun times and the laughter and play you share on a vacation is like money in the bank that you can draw on during the tough times,” she says.

Still, destinations are an essential part of travel, and Tanner says they are most likely to capture interest if children are involved in the planning process.

She suggests that the children be encouraged to call or write the Chamber of Commerce and find out what the main attractions are in the cities they’ll be visiting. And if the trip will involve a stay with distant relatives, urge the children to start corresponding with them well in advance so they will not feel like they are visiting strangers, she adds.

Ken Rhea, a Huntington Beach marriage, family and child counselor who recently led a workshop on how to plan successful family vacations, points out that parents may have to make some sacrifices in order to make sure their children have a good time.

He and his wife love to visit big cities and wander through museums, but they don’t take urban vacations with their 5-year-old son, Kevin, because they know he’d end up bored, tired and difficult to manage. Instead, they take him camping or to visit relatives on the East Coast.

When changing time zones, Rhea makes a special effort to respond to his son’s inner time clock. Kevin stays on California time when he’s on the East Coast, so Rhea allows him to have a flexible bedtime rather than trying to force him to go to sleep when he isn’t tired.

That can be hard on Rhea, especially when he’s worn out and Kevin is still awake at midnight. However, the therapist explains, it pays to put himself out a bit in order to accommodate his son’s needs when they’re traveling.

“Then I have more fun, because he’s less of a behavior problem. And he doesn’t get scolded for things he can’t control.”

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Cathy Priest, a mother of three who lives in Orange, has also found that young children do best on family trips when their needs are given top priority. Wherever she and her husband take their children--ages 7, 5 and 1--they make a point of setting aside time every afternoon for naps, and they do their sightseeing in small doses rather than taking exhausting, all-day excursions.

“Consider the ages of your kids and how much they can do, and don’t try to push them to do more,” advises Priest, who makes a point of “kid-orienting” her family trips.

When the trip involves a long drive, that means making frequent stops at rest areas or parks where the kids can run and play, bringing enough games and other activities to keep each child busy in the car and providing plenty of snacks from home. (“We find that if they’re on their own diet, they’re a lot happier--and we save money,” Priest says.)

Maintaining a kid-oriented mentality is tough when traveling with an only child, says Dorothy Nadeau, an Irvine resident who has a 12-year-old son.

“My husband and I have to take the time to stop doing our adult things and really concentrate on him. We tend to do it for a while and then slip into our own conversation,” Nadeau says.

She used to think her son, Tyler, would enjoy her favorite type of vacation--going to an upscale hotel where the main attractions are good food, shopping and tennis. But after seeing how quickly he became bored on one such trip, she realized she needed to do a better job of planning kid-oriented vacations.

Now, instead of traveling as a threesome, the Nadeaus often take one of Tyler’s friends along. Or they give him a chance to get away with one parent at a time so that he has the luxury of their undivided attention. Of all the trips he’s taken, he talks most about going to Palm Springs with his dad last year and visiting Mt. Rushmore with his mom four years ago.

“It was the neatest experience we’ve ever had together,” Nadeau says. “We really got to know each other.”

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Bari Lokken, a mother of three in Irvine, had a similar experience when she took one of her teen-age daughters on a “totally unstructured, unplanned” driving trip. They thoroughly enjoyed themselves, and Lokken couldn’t help comparing this trip to the disastrous one she had taken with all three kids a number of years earlier, when they were ages 6, 11 and 14. She was living in Alabama at the time and decided it was time for the kids to see Washington, D.C. She was shocked by their lack of enthusiasm.

“My oldest daughter didn’t want to be seen with us and made it clear that if she had to go, she’d make us miserable. The middle one didn’t want to sit next to her little brother in the car, and the older one didn’t want to be next to the middle one.”

The drive was “horrible,” because the kids never stopped fighting, and one of them kept getting car sick. And once they got to Washington, they showed no interest in the historic sites. This remark from one child who was struck with boredom on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was typical: “We know about him, Mom. Let’s go.”

They ended up cutting most of their sightseeing tours short because of the kids’ lack of interest, and Lokken went home feeling frustrated and disappointed.

Now she realizes that, given her children’s incompatible ages, she should never have expected them to get along with each other on such an ambitious trip. Nor should she have expected the younger ones to appreciate the historic sites. “If I had taken the oldest girl and a couple of her girlfriends, it would have been ideal,” Lokken says.

Although the Washington trip was discouraging, Lokken didn’t give up on family travel. But she did adjust her expectations. As she puts it: “You grit your teeth and go and have a sense of humor. You prepare for the worst and enjoy the best.”