a spring break memory

this is not a vacation planning guide

For the past two years, we have traveled to California for spring break. As a teacher, I get the last week of March off, and Ari’s preschool is also closed. Last year, we went to San Diego. We went to the zoo, a Padres game, a children’s museum, and a park by the beach. When we got home, Ari talked about “Nancy the Nissan” and chanted “Let’s go, Padres!” (followed by requisite clapping) for months. Any time he was driving during imaginative play, he always traveled to San Diego. I had a realization — this is why people take their children on vacation. Of course it is just “away game parenting,” but it is (or at least, can be) more than that. This year, we stayed with friends in Los Angeles, and while the shine had worn off a little bit, it was still well worth the expense and trouble.

The most magical moment of the trip (for me) happened during the biggest inconvenience. To save money on airfare, we decided to fly into Everett, Washington (outside of Seattle). My husband researched and found an incredible children’s museum, so we planned our stay around that being the final destination of our trip. There were no rental cars left in the town when we made our plan, so we decided to be cute and European and take the Amtrak back home. Just as we were getting ready for the children’s museum, we got an alert that our train was canceled due to a mudslide, but not to worry because Amtrak had already rebooked us via bus route back to Portland. We shrugged our shoulders and proceeded to find coffee and breakfast before spending 2.5 hours at the best children’s museum I’ve ever been to. We left the museum and grabbed our bags from the hotel, and then began the first two legs of our trip, a bus to the Everett bus station and then a bus to Seattle.

By the time we got on that second bus, Ari was overstimulated and exhausted, bouncing from my seat to Jonny’s seat until finally I asked him if he wanted to share headphones with me. I placed the earbud close to his ear, and he asked me to play “Thunderstruck” by ACDC (known to him because of the movie Planes). He put his head next to my lap and his feet up on the window. I watched his face relax with comfort and familiarity, his expression soften, and his eyes start to flutter. He was asleep before the second verse of the song. I realized it had been months, probably more than a year, since I had watched him fall asleep, something I used to do almost daily when he was a newborn.

Of course, his nap was cut short by our arrival and bus change in Seattle. He refused to eat the hot dog or turkey sandwich we picked up before boarding. He had a tantrum over being denied the extra gummy snacks given to us by a kind driver. The old, mildly overheating laptop mildly scorched his thighs as he watched endless segments of Gecko’s Garage. He got really frustrated when he realized that our fourth bus was not our final bus. By the time we got home, fed, bathed, and getting ready for bed, I pulled him into my lap and asked him our standard family check-in question: high/low/buffalo (good thing that happened today, bad thing that happened today, and surprise thing that happened today). His high and buffalo were both related to the museum (of course), but when we got to low, he thought for a second and said, “I didn’t really have a low.”

Me either, bud.