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TRAVEL

There's nothing like a summer road trip to bring people closer together – or drive them dramatically apart. Globe writers and editors reminisce about their most disastrous, Griswoldian road trips

Top, the Krashinsky family – Michael, Globe reporter Susan, Kathie and Jon – in summer 1986, at a rest stop on the way to New Hampshire, where they learned an awful lot about cranberries. Bottom, Globe editor Victor Dwyer in the foreground of a photo proving his love of road trips: second from the right is his friend Maureen Houston, with whom he survived a 13-hour hitchhiking journey in the summer of 1980.

Ah yes, the summer road trip, full of exploration and excitement – not to mention violent illness, catastrophic GPS failure and wildlife surprises. Interactions with shifty characters take on special intensity in tight spaces, while kind strangers on the open road create goodwill that lasts a lifetime. Dive into the gory details of Globe staffers' most memorable four-wheeled adventures to learn what those odysseys taught them about family, friends – and other passengers on board.

A cranberry cocktail for disaster

Everyone has their favourite road trip jam. Volume up, foot on the gas, sing along. For my dad, this was Mozart's Clarinet concerto in A major. This should have been the first warning that his idea of "fun" would not be compatible with a child's.

And yet, on that hot mid-1980s afternoon when my brothers and I were told to pile into the car for a surprise that was "really neat," we were swept up in giddy anticipation.

After all, we were already in an absurdly pretty small town in New Hampshire – the Rochester you've never heard of, where we spent every summer in my mother's childhood home – a place of uncommon fun. Kids ran free on a street where everyone watched out for them; our grandparents beamed at the rare presence of their Canadian family; there was a pool. Who could blame us for our foolish optimism?

The anticipation simmered. Then we pulled into a parking lot.

"Here we are," my mother declared.

We looked around, scanning the horizon for the amusement park or baseball stadium or circus that surely awaited us. Instead, we found ourselves at Cranberry World.

The name, alone, was a major problem, the absurd grandiosity of that second word almost deliberately mocking the folly of great expectations.

Susan Krashinsky Robertson with her grandfather Paul Urion in the pool in Rochester, New Hampshire, summer 1985.

You didn't win the Super Bowl, you weren't going to Disney World. You thought you were headed for unimaginable technicolor fun; you got cranberries. In the back seat, stunned silence.

Harry, the oldest and mature beyond his years, usually acted as a mediator, backing our parents' decisions to we other two. But even he was unable to feign even a halfhearted "yay."

"My recollection is that we all had expressions on our faces that were better suited to victims of pranks gone horribly wrong – angry, but mainly confused and shocked that someone could do this to us," Harry says now.

"It was so hyped," Jon, my middle brother, says. "It's burned into my brain like a pink, tart trauma."

Following an apparent recommendation in the Canadian Automobile Association guide, our parents had brought us to a museum of cranberries, a large-scale marketing campaign designed as a roadside attraction, operated (of course) by Ocean Spray. It really was just cranberries. A Lucite tube full of them, waiting to be sorted. A huge wooden vat in the middle of the room, filled with cranberries. Exhibits on cranberry farming through history.

"The hilarious fact that the entire venue was a massive advertisement for Ocean Spray, thinly presented as a museum, was not lost on me, even at that age," Jon recalls. We seethed with the kind of indignant rage that only children who are truly devoid of real problems can muster.

Mom desperately tried to salvage the experience. Like many teachers, she had perfected the art of looking right through a child's bald contempt for learning, pointing out interesting facts with an impervious smile. Why, look! Here was a large-scale model of a cranberry, cross-sectioned to show the seeds! But even she cracked at some point, asking, "Jon, did you like that part?" and then dissolving into gasping giggles at the sight of his outraged scowl.

While visiting her grandparents in New Hampshire, Susan Krashinsky Robertson’s parents decided to take their children to Cranberry World in Plymouth, Mass. The kids were not impressed.

Dad was worse. He could not suppress his gusto at discovering that cranberries' freshness could be determined by how high they bounce, and at watching a demonstration of a "bounce test" the company said was still in use for its crops. Our eyes rolled like they were trying to snap free of their moorings. He seemed to feed on our disdain, with the same instinct that made him play Captain and Tennille's Muskrat Love on repeat after my brother made the mistake of saying he hated it. "C'mon, you have to admit THAT part was interesting," he said, over and over, knowing it wasn't.

The only thing that made the experience even remotely salvageable was the promise of free juice samples at the end, doled out in tiny paper cups. Sadly, by the time we reached the exit, they were out.

Forget it, Jake. It's Cranberry World.

Recently, on our way somewhere else, I sat across from my mother in a bustling highway rest stop. Across from us, a caterwauling infant grew red in the face as her brothers clambered out of their chairs and hurled toys. "God, three children. It's like a nightmare," I said. "You're outnumbered." She let out a low, monosyllabic laugh. "You have no idea," she replied.

Every September, there would be one kid in class bragging about how his family had driven all the way to Orlando – to, yes, Disney World. I'm glad we never did. I wouldn't trade running through that New Hampshire house in my water wings, my lungs stretched and sore from kinetic summer afternoons, chasing after my brothers and my cousin or testing the almost boundless patience of Joshua the golden retriever.

My grandparents would always wait up to greet us, arriving late each year, my parents having insisted we could do the drive from Scarborough, Ont., in just one day. We were always allowed to have a night swim – running past the sizzling glow of the flytrap and grazing toes on the concrete sides of the pool – before clambering into the cluster of twin beds in a room the children shared. For all we knew, they'd always be there – Grammie sweet and smelling like home, Grandpa with his goldfish crackers you could always steal and his supposedly strict alone time with his newspaper that the right kind of four-year-old could always interrupt.

I will always carry those summers with me.

But I'll never be grateful for Cranberry World.

Susan Krashinsky Robertson


Next stop, Montreal?

The summer of 1980 was winding down and three friends and I had a few days to kill before the onslaught of a new term at Queen's University. At some point, my friend Cynthia announced she'd decided to squeeze in a preterm visit to her parents in Montreal where, in two days' time, her dad would be running in the city's marathon.

For some reason, we decided it made perfect sense for all of us to go cheer him on. But how would we get there? Certainly none of us owned a car. Train tickets cost money. The only solution was hitching. We cranked up early the next day and hopped a city bus to Highway 401, hived off into teams of two – Cynthia and Murray; me and Maureen – and stuck out our thumbs.

How a driver could see two of those thumbs so quickly remains a mystery to this day, but about 15 seconds later, Cynthia and Murray were climbing into the back seat of what car ads then called a full-size four-door luxury sedan (Maureen and I later found out it had a great stereo system).

"A good day for rides," Maureen purred, as they rode off, her thumb extended, her posture confident, her face showing the early signs of what would become a memorable sunburn.

It was a good day for rides if your measure was the number of them.

Our first was a family driving to Gananoque, 20-odd minutes down the highway, who hoped we didn't mind playing I Spy in the back with the kids, which we didn't (mind, that is).

Next up – by which I mean something like two hours later – was a roomier lift, though with a more problematic Samaritan. Sporting an in-progress bottle of beer in his cup holder (a fact we didn't notice when climbing aboard), he was about as drunk as a person could be at 11 a.m., and, at our suggestion, dropped us off one ramp later.

Globe editor Victor Dwyer (foreground) is pictured on another road trip – via Kingston City bus – that landed him and several friends in trouble again, on his birthday in 1982.

What followed were a series of short lifts between long waits under a summer sky uncorrupted by clouds, and none of the drivers got any less weird.

There was the old guy in the pickup truck who spoke not a single word; and the nice lady who told us we shouldn't be hitchhiking in this crazy world, before suggesting a range of possible violent ends we could well meet. There was a Jesus look-a-like, if Jesus drove shirtless and wore high-riding cutoff jeans; and a chain-smoking couple, former hitchhikers themselves, in a junker of a Pinto.

My favourite was probably the man just before the Quebec border who pulled onto the shoulder in a plush, oversized car of the kind Murray and Cynthia had slithered into hours earlier. As we settled into the back seat, I leaned up to ask him how far he was going, as it was getting late in the day. His reply: "Next exit." It seemed churlish, as it had so many times that day, to ask why he'd bothered to stop.

Google tells me it takes just more than three hours to drive from Kingston to Montreal. It took us 13 hours and eight rides (a couple of them even blessedly unmemorable and more than a few minutes long). We arrived, charred and exhausted, at 10 p.m.

Cynthia's dad, it turned out, had had a bad day, too: He'd twisted an ankle. Murray, no long-distance runner but nicely rested after the pair of back-to-back air-conditioned rides that had ferried him and Cynthia into the city some time around noon, had already arranged to use the paid-for number and run the race in his place.

Maureen and I managed to get up the next day in time to cheer him past the finish line. But only after a marathon sunburned slumber, during which my thumb has never slept so well.

Victor Dwyer


Grandma, the rainstorm and the bottle

The Isle of Skye off the Scottish coast held mythical status for my father, Chris.

He first hiked Skye's hills as a university student, on one of those sunny weekends that Scotland gets every century or two. It was a chance for him, a child raised in the London suburbs, to take in highland sights such as a rock formation called the Old Man of Storr. One evening, he shook hands with his first Talisker, a single malt distilled on the island that marries Skye's peat bogs to the iodine taste of the nearby sea.

That adventure on Skye loomed large in my father's passage into adulthood. It also left an abiding passion for Skye's whisky, which even Scotch lovers admit is an acquired taste.

In the 1970s, Chris was determined to repeat his Scottish experience along with his family – three young kids, a wife, and Ethel, his recently-widowed mother-in-law from Fernie, B.C., a coal mining town in the Rockies. The trip from London, where he was on sabbatical, to Scotland happened on a budget, and in a Volkswagen van, the model with a bunkbed in the pop-up roof.

With six people packed into a vehicle with beds for four, the trip was always going to be intimate. What made it an adventure was my reserved British father's still-evolving relationship with his outspoken, proudly small-town mother-in-law.

Chris had spent minimal time with his in-laws due to geographic distance and didn't really know Ethel. He was a university professor, she owned a hardware store: as the VW headed towards Scotland from London, they were still feeling each other out.

The one thing all of us knew is that Ethel liked a rye and water at cocktail hour. Nothing fancy, thanks, just good Canadian whisky with a splash. As an aside, she taught me to treat spirits with respect, as all of her grandchildren served as her bartender before she passed at 100; her cry of "Jesus, don't drown the drink," still echoes in my head when I reach for mix.

Light rain was falling when we took the short ferry ride to Skye, but by the time we pulled into a campsite on the edge of a sheep farm, drizzle had become showers. Hiking was postponed. We kids took a quick run around the campsite, enough to coat rain-boots in sheep manure, while Chris mixed his wife and mother-in-law a rye and water and poured himself a Scotch.

The next day, it rained even harder. Chris kept peering at the clouds, hoping for a glimpse of Skye's fabled Cuillin Hills. They didn't appear. The VW's wheels sank into the muck of the soggy field, requiring the help of other campers to return it to firmer ground. With their help, we got the van on firmer ground.

More drinks were served. And more. Then, at some point on day three of the deluge, Chris ran out of rye.

Buying Canadian whisky on an Inner Hebrides island in the 1970s was not a possibility. By this point, Ethel would have been cold, damp and maybe a little homesick – take away her rye and water and all she had to look forward to in the evening was sleeping in a van next to a child who reeked of sheep shit and wet wool.

Chris started pouring Talisker, serving a glass of wood smoke, peat and seaweed to palates accustomed to a lot less flavour. He must have held his breath; my memory is there wasn't a word of complaint.

I recall going to sleep to the sound of my parents and grandmother playing cards, talking about their childhoods, laughing and killing at least that bottle.

We never hiked Skye. The clouds never lifted. The rain never stopped. The VW almost sank. We ran out of rye. It could have been a disaster. But the three of them joked all through the next day, as we helped other campers get out of the muck, then headed back to London.

That road trip created, then cemented my father's relationship to his in-laws, and in turn enriched my parent's marriage. In its own wet way, the journey to Skye was one of our most important family adventures.

Andrew Willis


That stinks

In truth, we were too poor and dysfunctional for road trips and my father didn't like being in the car with us for more than two hours. Even that tested his patience, as witnessed by his chain-smoking with windows rolled up in the winter, or, mercifully down in the summer, when his lit ember would fly out the car's front window and boomerang through the back, hitting my brother in the eye with unerring accuracy.

Or so my brother says.

If we were lucky, summer vacations meant our mother would bundle the four of us onto the train – or in one unimaginably luxurious exception, an airplane – for a trip to visit her parents in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. This was not, a "vacation" for her, as it meant taking a brief break from working full-time to corral four rambunctious children, on her own, on an overnight train from Toronto to Halifax.

Our Nova Scotia summers were a mix of the idyllic and the absurd, and are catalogued in family memory like signs of the Chinese zodiac. First was the Year of the Snake, when my mother saw something wriggling in the long grass and promptly dropped my toddler brother and ran screaming into the house (my grandfather was sent out to retrieve his grandson).

Then came the Year of the Rabbit, when my father, charged with looking after my sister's pet back home, grew tired of this chore, put it in a crate and sent it by train to Halifax. At least he didn't eat it.

The summer it all came to a head was the Year of the Hearse. It began badly, with our luggage lost on its way from Toronto and my mother on the phone every day trying to track it down.

"I don't think you understand," she pleaded. "You do not understand just how bad four children smell after a week in the same clothes." We, the children, were happy in the same clothes: Happy to wander the Bay of Fundy mud flats in search of scallop shells, eat wild raspberries and sit in relatives' kitchens drinking endless cups of tea strong enough to stand on. By the time these good things had come to their inevitable end, our luggage still hadn't been found.

Elizabeth Renzetti as a kid on a family roadtrip in Halifax.

My mother didn't drive, so every year we would take a taxi from the Valley to Halifax ($50, an extraordinary bargain). The only local cab driver, in the way of small towns, also happened to be the undertaker. When my mother called him to arrange our ride to Halifax, he told her with regret that he had a funeral that day and couldn't take us.

How was she going to get her four foul-smelling children to the train? The locals put their heads together. It turned out there was another fellow who would be willing to make the two-and-a-half hour drive.

There was one problem: This cab driver had only one arm. But my mother is nothing if not practical. The undertaker was out and the one-armed man was in.

We all piled into the car, probably leaving a cloud of filth in our wake. We set off for Halifax on the old highway, with the Annapolis River winding away behind us.

Not long after we left, we heard a frantic beeping and we all turned as one to see the undertaker in his hearse passing our taxi. We may not have arrived in Halifax first, but we did get there alive.

Elizabeth Renzetti


Can't stop, won't stop

The plan was to drive from Toronto to Washington, to spend Christmas with my wife's family. It can be a lovely drive, through the broad valleys of upstate New York and the intimate dells of Pennsylvania until you bear southwest at Maryland for the teeming importance of Washington. It takes about 12 hours.

We set out at 6 a.m., and by 8 a.m., my daughter, Hayley, was complaining: she felt sick to her stomach. "Like I'm going to throw up," she said. She might have been 14 at the time. It didn't seem serious and we were expected for Christmas dinner at the in-laws', a command performance.

"If you have to throw up, throw up in this plastic bag," my wife said.

Which, 10 minutes later, my daughter proceeded to do. I knew immediately that this was no earthly vomiting.

When I use the term "threw up," I do not mean a delicate regurgitation of the morning's bagel into a discretely hidden and quickly bagged polyethylene sack. I mean she practically turned herself inside-out into said bag.

The volume alone was impressive; the sound effects, a raging HUAGGGHHH and a resounding, non-Olympic splash, would not have been out of place in a Dolby-lined IMAX theatre showing the movie Niagara.

Roughly five minutes later, she did it again.

"We're out of bags," I said, rubbing her back. "Maybe we should turn back."

"We're almost at the border," my wife said, and I could hear from her tone that this was not a negotiable subject. "We're just going to keep going." Then Hayley threw up again.

By the time we reached Buffalo, having stopped at the duty free shop to vomit and load up on plastic bags, Hayley was vomiting every 10 minutes. At least I think she was: I can't be sure, because by then I was myself vomiting into plastic on my own, also every 10 minutes.

We had a kind of syncopation going: her in the back, me in the front, alternately puking. We'd clearly managed to contract the same fast-acting and highly contagious flu. By Rochester – "Ruuaaaggghhchester," get it? – we were predictably calling the Camry the Vomit Comet.

Each bag was good for about three upchucks, after which you tied it off and placed it gingerly on the floor of the moving car. Every time we stopped for gas, we filed out with our full bags and rushed into the bathroom to vomit some more.

When we stopped for gas near Scranton, Pa., we both jumped out of the car, hit the cans for a puke, and then, returning one by one to the car, each leaned into the garbage can beside the gas station door to puke again.

"Hey," a guy at the gas pump next to my wife said, unblinking. "That guy just puked into the same garbage can that that girl puked into."

Somewhere near Baltimore, our upchuckings began to space out. By the time we reached my brother-in-law's place, they had stopped completely. We were quarantined in the bathroom for a day, regardless. It's the one Christmas I never forget.

Ian Brown