The Tripkit
He wanted us to see that the world was bigger than where we lived.
The AAA office was forty-five minutes from our town, which had a population of five hundred people and definitely no AAA office, much less a proper stoplight. My parents made the drive anyway, in the weeks before every summer, and came home with the Tripkit: a packet of strip maps that showed only the road we’d be on — turn by turn, nothing on either side — and a thick booklet listing hotels by state, each one rated by stars. My mother found the maps annoying. I loved them. I loved the booklet too, the way you could run your finger down a column of listings and imagine arriving somewhere. We were looking for two or three stars. We were looking for a pool.
I don’t remember when I became one of the navigators. Somewhere around ten or eleven, I think, old enough to hold a map, folded in sections without it taking over the whole backseat, old enough to announce exits and count miles out loud. My mother did the same from the passenger seat. My father drove. My brother, three years younger, had no interest in any of this and was content to exist beside me in his own world, whatever he was doing with his hands that hour.
My father’s eyes stayed on the road, and he had full control of the books on tape. Of Mice and Men is the only one I remember. I’m fairly sure he used those tapes to put me and my brother to sleep — it was highly effective — and it wasn’t just one tape per book. It was at least eight. Maybe twelve.
The trips happened every summer, organized around his other great love — stained glass. My father was devoted to the craft of it. It was his life – the small business he created, Advent Glass Works. He loved the making of it and the community, and the annual conference of the Stained Glass Association of America moved from city to city each year. That was the destination, the anchor. Everything else was the trip. We drove to it, always, in a car packed full, and my mother’s first priority in scoping out the hotel listings was a pool. Holiday Inn was reliable for this. We stayed in a lot of Holiday Inns.
I understood later that these summers were not cheap. There were years when the trip back home left no money for new school clothes in August. My father owned his small business, selling custom stained glass windows to churches – not a hot market, and one that occasionally turned a profit. My mother was a teacher, and her schedule was why summers worked — she was free. But the money was always tight, in the way that it is when one teacher and one stained glass artisan with a small business are raising two children in rural Florida. It was tight, and they went anyway. Or rather: he went anyway. The trip was not negotiable. The trip was the point.
I didn’t understand that at the time. I just knew we were going somewhere.
Toronto was 1985. I was twelve, which means my brother was nine. I remember the hotel was in a tall building surrounded by city blocks. I remember that the gala for the SGAA meeting that year was held at a castle. A castle, in Toronto. I remember standing on the balcony with my father — the rooftop, or something like it, an outdoor space high above the city — and I remember my father handing me his glass of champagne to taste.
Dom Pérignon. I didn’t know what that meant then. I know what it means now.
He gave it to me like it was normal, like of course a twelve-year-old should have a sip of champagne on a castle rooftop in Toronto, like the world contained experiences worth offering to your children before they were old enough to have earned them. I took a sip. I remember the bubbles more than the taste. I remember the feeling that something had been extended to me that I was not quite ready for and would spend years growing into.
My brother and I had breakfast alone that same trip, just the two of us, in the hotel restaurant. We ordered from a menu and signed the check to the room. I had never signed a check to a room. I wrote my last name very carefully, the way you do when you are pretending to be older than you are. I remember the waitress being very patient with us. I wonder now if she thought the scene was strange, wondered where our parents were.
The 1983 trip was six weeks. We drove to Palo Alto, then north to Seattle, then east across the country in a long arc home. Somewhere in Seattle, I watched salmon jumping in the locks. I tried lox for the first time, on a bagel, with cream cheese, and I remember the specific sensation of not being sure I liked it and deciding I did anyway.
We came home through Pennsylvania, through the Fourth of July. We ate Pizza Hut for dinner and I fell asleep in the tent after watching fireworks with my brother, visible only through a gap in the fabric door, bursts of light and noise and awe. My parents slept in our conversion van. And I remember that the tent was placed on uneven ground, and my brother and I both ended up having rolled to one side the next morning.
My father is gone now. He died in February 2014 — a sudden, devastating stroke, after the slower impact of dementia in the couple of years before it.
I don’t know exactly when I understood what those summers were. It wasn’t while I was in them. Maybe it was somewhere in medical school, watching what people hold onto when things get hard. Maybe it was later, in my own clinic, in rooms where people are making decisions about what they still have time for.
He wanted us to see that the world was bigger than where we lived. That was the whole thing. The Tripkit and the strip maps and the pool and the champagne on the rooftop and the lox and the salmon in the locks and fireworks through the gap in the tent — all of it was the same gesture, repeated for years, in every direction he could afford to drive us.
Look, he was saying. Look at what’s out there.
I have been looking ever since.
If you are new here: I am a gynecologic medical oncologist and the founder of MMarkham Travel, a luxury travel advisory. I write about time, and what we do with it, and occasionally about the specific and underrated pleasure of a very good hotel. I am glad you found this.
Thank you for sharing this! 🥰