Memorable Bumps on the Road

Disasters on family vacations? It’s OK. Treasure the bad moments. Your children might even find them the most memorable part of the trip and, in retrospect, mishaps can make the best family stories.

“We remember things that are outside the ordinary. It’s the way memory works,” said Dr. Bennett Leventhal, a child psychiatrist and chief of psychiatry at the University of Chicago. “And then the stories get told and retold.”

When it comes to family trips, there is plenty to talk about. I haven’t gone on a family trip yet that has gone off without a hitch.

It has rained when I expected sun and snowed so hard we couldn’t ski. We’ve been sick 3,000 miles from home in a cabin with not enough towels, and have been lost more times than I’d like to remember on city freeways and lonely country roads. I hold my breath when I check in to a hotel for fear they’ve lost the reservation--again.

The glitches, I’ve realized, tend to make the trips more challenging and interesting, as together we struggle to overcome the obstacle-of-the-moment. Unplanned for events have led to lots of unexpected adventures and laughs along the way.

“Vacations are a microcosm of life. There are always changes and curves,” observes Virginia family therapist Alan Entin, a past president of the American Psychological Assn.’s family psychology division.

Leventhal’s sons still talk about the time they arrived on a small island and found that not a single car was available, though they’d reserved one well in advance. The family was stranded in the middle of the night an hour from their destination. Then, unexpectedly, an airport worker offered them a ride. “He told us stories about the island the whole way,” Leventhal said. “An experience can be good or bad. It all depends how you handle it.”

That’s true even when it seems everything possible has gone wrong. Instead of giving up, consider those times a chance to show the kids some creative problem-solving. Overcoming an obstacle together--especially away from home--certainly can draw the family closer together.

“There’s bonding that takes place in times of adversity,” said Marsha Goodman of Portland, Ore. “We don’t talk about our more successful trips nearly as much.” That may be because such a misadventure becomes a unique experience only the family has shared,” said Janine Roberts, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts and an expert on family stories.

Her advice when plans go awry is to remain calm, keep laughing and keep focusing on stories the kids can tell later. “That might give you the space to separate your emotions from the situation,” Roberts said.

Don’t be embarrassed to admit how a trip has gone wrong, no matter how much you’ve spent or how organized you’ve been.

There’s another important lesson we’ve all learned from our vacation foibles. We can live without perfection. What counts is taking those curves together.

Taking the Kids appears the first and third week of every month.