*At some point, several years into it, I started calling James “Jim,” and he stopped calling me “Markee” and went with my given name. I think we’ve finally grown into them. So from here on out, I’ll refer to him as “Jim,” but he’s still the same husband.
I have often read (probably because I read a lot of home improvement magazines) that if your marriage can survive a home renovation, then it can survive anything. But since the first year of our marriage, every house we’ve lived in has been under constant renovation, and we have come to the conclusion that arguing while balancing babies and laundry baskets, and stepping over table saws and lumber in the hallway, was the natural state of things. We actually got used to it, to the point where most disagreements lacked any good old acrimony. No, the litmus test for the strength of our relationship so far has been whether or not we can survive vacation together.
This goes all the way back to our first vacation, which I will just call “The Honeymoon.” As I recall, this began the night we got married, just after the mayonnaise buffet at the wedding (Jim swears it was the key ingredient in everything), but before we got into a heated dispute over who lost the tickets (me) for the Victoria Clipper, our transportation to Victoria, British Colombia. It has set the tone for all vacations since.
Apparently Mom, who had misplaced the copy of our marriage vows and desperately tore the house apart looking for them the night before the wedding, removed everything from our packed bags and repacked all of my clothes, but not Jim’s, a small oversight which resulted in Jim wearing the exact same outfit in every single one of our pictures that week. Luckily for Jim, Mom did replace all of my brand-spanking-new lingerie, so I had new outfits every day and night, but thank goodness, no pictures to share here.
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Day 1
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Day 2
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Day 3
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After the first day, Jim and I realized that 1) a person on foot can see Victoria in approximately 6 hours and 2) we were sleeping in the same hotel as several high school bands. They were in town for a competition and practiced diligently throughout the day, but with especial fervor when normal people were trying to sleep.
Other highlights of that trip include the third night when it suddenly occurred to me that my legal name was no longer “Guadiz,” which prompted copious amounts of tears on my part and demands to go back home so I could spend the rest of the week with my family. Yes. In print, that doesn’t look so good. Also, Jim hanging off the back of the Victoria Clipper, sick as a dog, for both the going and returning trip, while I heartlessly sampled peanuts, crackers, and other complimentary snacks inside. Scratch vacations involving boats. Also scratch vacations involving honeymoons.
Our next vacation, to celebrate Jim’s acceptance into med school, began with our buying a three-person tent (if all three were midgets) and going camping in Arkansas. I had camped often, growing up, and thought there was nothing to it. In retrospect, this is only true if your dad plans the trip, packs everything, cooks everything, and leaves you with the onerous duty of reading, napping, and brushing your own teeth.
When Jim and I tried, we started out too late, arrived at the state park after dusk, hiked in a half a mile and then pitched our tent because we couldn’t see anything. Hot dogs were eaten ice cold because we couldn’t get a fire started with merely our wits, soggy wood, and a match; someone’s brilliant plan to smash open a half-filled but malfunctioning lighter for the lighter fluid resulted in a small explosion, but no fire. Then Jim’s multiple treks to and from the car, trying to keep the car cigarette lighter hot between his ice-cold, cupped, lighter-fluid-sprayed hands were dismally unsuccessful. A friend had mentioned that putting a bucket full of coals inside the tent would keep it warm, but since we never got beyond smoldering chunks of wood, this only resulted in our smelling like so much beef jerky. Now I know what you’re thinking: “Who let this guy into med school?” But that is not nearly as important as what I was thinking, which was, “Who let this guy into med school?”
And then we discovered that families actually had the audacity to bring their children with them camping. Of course, they played Marco Polo into the wee hours outside our tent. And because we did not bother staking the tent (in part because in Arkansas, you hit bedrock one inch down, but also possibly because we forgot about the stakes) the harsh dawn revealed that we had either pitched our tent on, or else the tent had slid down the incline onto, the hiking path. Seasoned hikers tramped around us, and (justifiably) thought, “Idiots!” behind benevolent smirks. Scratch camping.
Some years and a few kids later, we tried Hawaii. What nobody tells you is that Hawaii is like Mexico: don’t go off the resort, especially if you go to Kauai, where the locals generally doubt the good intentions of “haoles,” (whites) schedules (including dinner reservations) mean nothing, and there is no air conditioning outside of luxury hotels. The a/c we could have managed without, but the cacophony of the wild roosters (freed from their coops by Hurricane Iniki in 1992) tended to be a little jarring at 4 a.m. when you had to have your windows open to catch the trade winds. So while Woody could easily have passed as a local, and the only thing that gave me away was that at 5’2”, I was taller than all the women and half the men, Jim, Jack and Betsy stuck out like sore thumbs. Also, the kids turned their nose up at Spam, which is a dead giveaway you aren’t local, in a place where McDonalds includes Spam as an add-on to all their menu items. By the time we left, Jim was convinced that “Mahalo” secretly meant, “Up Yours.”
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Jim's interpretation of "Mahalo"
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Knowing he would dread the return flight home, Jim popped Atavan like tic-tacs, so when we reached LAX, he was higher than a kite while at the same time resting on me so heavily it was all I could do to stagger down the terminal where he leaned so far over the ticket counter he was behind the ticket agent. Afterwards, he told me he experienced great difficulty trying to watch the in-flight movie because it was featured in Spanish, which he found incredibly irritating. Even worse, apparently everybody around him understood Spanish because they were laughing uproariously. Later, after the Atavan wore off, it occurred to him that he had selected the Spanish-language channel for his headset. Scratch Hawaii. Scratch flying. Scratch Atavan.
And then there was the train trip to Washington D.C. The one where Woody came down with a bug, but I just knew he was complaining about having to walk four miles a day to all the sites. But then he was sick on the bed, then the couch, then the chair in the hotel. So I grudgingly conceded his point. Since our method of operation is to pass an illness from one to another, sometimes multiple times for fun, but never to come down with it all at once, the green tinge on one or the other of the kids’ faces each day in those vacation pictures has nothing to do with lighting. Two-year-old Betsy succumbed and was impressively sick all over Jim as we were eating lunch at the train station the last day. Of course, all our clothes were packed and waiting to go on the train. In spite of the fact that both Jim and I came down with the bug on the two-day trip home, we felt obligated to get off the train to eat at a local Chicago breakfast dive Jim had heard about, where they serve up your order in one great big skillet. We assume it was every bit as good as described, but since we both could have sworn we were still on a swaying train, even when seated with our heads as close to between our knees as we could get them, we aren’t sure. Scratch train travel.
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Poor Woody, somewhere in Washington D.C.
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Numerous attempts at road trips have revealed mildly noteworthy particulars: first, Betsy will always get sick and throw up the first night of road travel. Second, during the entire trip, the boys will only look up from their Nintendo games the same number of times you cross a state border and yell, “Hey, look! We’re in WYOMING! (Utah, Montana, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, etc.),” and occasionally during potty breaks, but I can’t guarantee the latter. Sometimes we aren’t even sure we have brought the boys with us. But this is okay because the girls make sure we never forget their presence, especially once Lucy gets tired and starts fussing. In record time, Betsy is wailing, “I can’t take it anymore! PLEASE make Lucy STOP CRYYYYIIIIINNNNGGGG!” We recorded the melee on my phone once, just so in case we ever got the travel bug again, we could replay four glorious minutes of both girls shrieking at the top of their lungs. We laugh about it, but it’s a high-pitched, panicked kind of laughter.
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We drove how far for this? Even at 2, Betsy (panning for gold in South Dakota, 2009) had the disgusted look perfected.
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At the sulphur pits, Yellowstone National Park, 2007.
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Inspecting the cannons at the old Spanish fort, St. Augustine, Fla., 2010. Yes. Betsy is falling apart there.
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1) In the name of all that’s holy, DON’T LET MARTHA GET HUNGRY! and then …
2) The only good vacation begins with “Disney” and ends with “World.”
The latter one is Jim’s, who was born in Miami, and lived in Ocala, Fla., until he was 11 years old. He still recalls with great fondness his parents gently shaking him and his sister awake at 5:30 a.m. and his staying awake long enough to make it to the car. Then he’d wake up a few hours later, just in time to see the spires of the Magic Kingdom’s Cinderella Castle on the new horizon. What followed was a week-long frolic in the happiest place in the world. That’s how he remembers it.
I guess because my experiences at Disney World have not been as magical as Jim wants them to be, he insists on trying over and over. After only five or six vacations there, I have learned that standing in line for an hour and a half for a kiddie ride is considered normal, the in-park food is awful, it’s all insanely overpriced, and wherever you look, kids are at some stage of behavioral meltdown. Sadly, one or two are usually mine. BUT, food is only minutes away from anywhere you are, there are no boats on open water, no flying involved at any time, and the only difference between the tourists and the locals is that the locals have a head-start on skin cancer.
On one of our recent trips there we stayed at the Disney Fort Wilderness Campground. That night I watched the kids toasting marshmallows, singing, and hopping around at the Chip and Dale Campfire Sing Along and outdoor movie. I asked Jim if it made him happy that he could share this experience with his kids. Jim smiled mistily into the distance and said, with a profound sense of satisfaction, “Who cares about them?”
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"How do I look?" Jim (with Jack) Walt Disney World, 2012.
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