Family Travel Routines

A New England Tradition (for us anyway) visiting Duncan Doughnuts

As a family we've visited Maine quite a few times.  This wasn't the first time we've gone to visit Granny Coco!  

Over the years there are places we go, or things we do that happen every time we travel 'out east'.  Just on the travel portion alone, there is the food court in the Seattle airport where we sit in that huge echoing room and eat bad fast food;  the same old downstairs baggage claim at Logan Airport where we once managed to find a baby car seat at the lost and found; the Kennebunkport Rest stop on I-95 where we fuel up on Burger King and Starbucks coffee, and of course, on the homeward bound trip, there is the Hilton Hotel where we always seem to spend the night prior to catching our early morning flight home. At the Hilton we always eat dinner in the same booth with the TV playing sports overhead and the kids examining their kid meals menus with the same old puzzles and point-to-points.  

This was our first trip out east as a 'smaller pack' but all the routines and places remained the same.  Just that instead of 4 we are now 3.

Such travel routines bring a sense of comfort and safety.  It is a way of creating a 'family mythology' - a 'this is what our family has always done'.  I remember these sorts of travel 'touchstones' from the family trips to Maine of my youth - the 'Hojos' in Brunswick, playing the alphabet game in the family car on the New Jersey Turnpike, stressed out parents as we navigated the traffic of New York City - 'should we take the Tappan Zee or the Tri Borough bridge?'.  All my siblings will immediately recognize these travel memories.  They are part of who we are as a family, and despite the passage of almost 40 years of life, remain a part of our family lore.

And so it is with Stuey, Nora and I.  I am certain that when Nora and Stuey think back on their trips out east they will remember dog walks around Beauchamp Point with Granny Coco, visits to the quaintly candy striped red and white Uncle Willy's Candy Shop in downtown Camden, and of course the periodic visits to Duncan Doughnuts!  We do not have 'DD' in Alaska.  They will remember the treks out the long granite breakwater to the lighthouse in Rockland Harbor (something we did not do this year), the family meals with cousins, and the hikes through the deciduous forest to the tops of the various Camden Hills.  

They are a part of the family story - the trips to Maine.  Our family mythology.

Patrick

Lobsters at the Kennebunkport rest stop on I-95

Leaving the house for a hike around the point with Coco the dog

Ah the candy shop . ..  .

Shooting hoops with the cousins

Stuey and John watch the Badgers take on the Georgetown Bulldogs

Dinner out on the town with the cousins

Stuey and the glacially scoured rocks of Rockport Harbor

With a Bloody Mary this substantial (it even had a piece of bacon on top) - who needs the meal?