Vacation Memories - In honor of Dad's birthday

From Sara:

Well, one thing about Payne family vacations: they were always in the car.  We'd play the license plate game and the alphabet game.  We'd poke each other.  Old pictures tell me that I rigged up a string to hold the bottle for one of the babies -- David?  James?  Dad drove like a champ, usually the whole way.  At some point Mom had made some pockets that hung on the back of the seat in front of you for books and entertainment stuff.  

I remember great times at Estes Park -- hikes in the mountains.  Other Haglund Family Reunions were always fun.  Swimming and suntanning on the docks in Wisconsin.  Silk screening t-shirts at the cabin.  Grandma and Grandpa's porch and side yard.  Cousins.

There were trips to Disneyworld and to the beach when we lived in New Orleans.   And day trips to Audabon Park, which were not really vacations, but kind of.  Then there were trips to Chicago and staying at Uncle Paul's apartment.  Uncle Paul's apartment: hot cereal for breakfast, a roommate named Tyler, a video rental store next door, the enormous red metal sculpture in an outdoor plaza (Calder?), reminding everyone to flush the toilet.  How did he ever put up with us? 

I remember when we got the van, and Dad made the padded, vinyl-covered platform for the back section, under which fit all the luggage, and on top of which we could lie down or play cards or whatever.   Very smooth.  And then when we got the little black VCR/TV combo, we could really travel in style.  That was revolutionary.  I felt like it was such a luxury.  

We went to Philmont one year, which was probably around 1988?  (I am guessing.)  That was a great trip, and I remember that Mom had packed our clothes by day in duffle bags.  There was a Monday bag for the whole family, and a Tuesday bag, etc.  Packing was a real procedure, I think.  I remember the talent shows at night at Philmont and "A-moo, a-moo, a-moo-moo-moo."  

There was one dreadful camping trip in Illinois, I think.  The mosquitos were so horrible, that my memory is that we ended up sleeping in the car.  Am I making this stuff up, or does anyone else remember it?

I remember our trip to the Southwest and Utah when I was about 15.  It was a long trip, and we went  to the Sand Dunes and the 4 Corners, and Mesa Verde National Monument.  I think Mom drove the van for some part of the trip, and it broke down outside of Provo (coming through the Alpine Loop? or down off of Timp?) and we ended up at her friend Carolee Hawkins house.  Like most of our trips to Utah, I suspect this trip also included the tour of the John and Sara Payne family sites (with the paper route/motor scooter bonus tour) in Provo.  (We do an expanded version of this tour with our kids when we go.)  We hiked to Timp Cave, and I think I started the full Timp hike, but for some reason, I did not finish it with the boys.  Hmmmm.  I wonder why?

One night when I think I was a junior in high school, you were all going to Disneyworld the next day.  Maybe it was Washington, DC. I actually can't remember where it was.  But  I had decided to stay home and do my school work and probably debate, but that night before you left, I changed my mind, and I came to your bedroom late in the night and asked if I could go with you all.  You said yes, and I did go, and I think I had to find some sort of way to send a term paper in for some class.  Did we find a fax machine?  Is that it?  Were fax machines invented yet?  I can't remember, but I do remember that I hand wrote that paper on a legal pad in the back of the van.

And in case that was the trip to DC, what I most remember about that (be prepared to be saddened by this) was a march for animal rights or something that we walked by on the mall.  Also, what I remember was all the Bart Simpson t-shirts for sale by vendors on the streets.  I think this was before we were able to watch the Simpsons.  I may be conflating some other trip with this one, but I think we may have gone to an art museum then, as well, which is when I saw a beautiful exhibit of Matisse cut outs, which I have loved ever since.

I remember when Mom and Dad took me to Chicago to take my endowments out at the temple before my mission. Not really a vacation, but  I  remember that we went to the art museum there, and I think they had a special Chagall exhibit., or maybe it was just the usual museum collection.    I also remember going to the temple dedication in Chicago when I was a youth, and I remember that Mom and I sat in the Celestial Room, which was  a special experience.

Most recently, we had a terrific time in the Colorado Rockies again, at Winter Park in 2009.  It was an awesome Haglund family reunion.  Adam wasn't there, so I was on my own with the kids, and all the boys and Mom and Dad helped out so much taking my kids to activities and helping me at meal time.  I thought that Jack (or was it Mark?) had fallen in the river at one point (I couldn't find him , but it turned out that he was hanging out with Dad in his room) and I had John, David, and Daniel all frantically looking for him all over the woods.  And Daniel -- driving to and from with us.  Amazing.  (He learned a few tricks, and on the way home, put the hammer down on water consumption and really reduced our bathroom stops.  Made the trip about 5 hours shorter.)  Hopefully, he still wants to have his own kids someday.  My kids are hoping we can go back to Colorado soon.  I am so glad we went.

From John: 

Happy birthday, Dad!  In honor of your day, Mom has asked us to write our memories of family vacations.  Here are mine.

When we were little, most of our family vacations were road trips.  We would pile into the van, with the specially modified seat covers (with pockets) and the TV and whatnot, and Dad would drive until we got there, no matter how far it was.  Dad required no rest, and no food-- just someone to scratch his head sometimes.  Usually that was Mom, but sometimes we kids got to help with that.  Sometimes we got to listen to music.  I think those long road trips were where I first fell in love with the Beatles.

On one family vacation, I think it was to the world's fair, I got lost.  I remember noticing that nobody was around, but I don't remember getting worried.  I think I was wading in the fountain, fishing for quarters when Dad found me.  On another family vacation, I lost Sam.  Mom asked if everyone was in the van and I said yes and we drove on for a couple of hours before a police car pulled Mom over and asked if she was missing a child.  As I recall, the people at McDonald's took such good care of Sam that I wished I had been the one who got left behind.

Some of our trips were long, like the ones to Disney World, where I remember playing on the beach in January.  Inside the park, I remember being disappointed that the monorail wasn't running, and pretending I wasn't scared of space mountain.  My favorite was probably the fort at Frontierland, where I could have played happily until I died.  And I loved the pavilion of nations at Epcot, even though there really wasn't much of a ride.  Maybe I was just a nerd.

Some trips were short, like the ones to Mud Island in Memphis, which remains one of the places I would most like to return to.  I was fascinated by the scale model of the Mississippi River running through the park, which we were allowed to wade and play in.   Awesome.  Also, there was some kind of giant spiderweb thing made of rope.  Or maybe that was somewhere else.  Honestly, a lot of these kind of blend together in my mind.

Trips to Utah were always special because we would get to see cousins, grandparents, BYU, temples, and the mountains.  I remember seeing a tear well up in Dad's eye as Timpanogos came into view.  When I was about 10 or so I remember an interminable argument about whether or not the mountain really was shaped that way because that's where Princess Timpanogos lay down to die.  I don't remember what side of the argument I was on.  When I was about 15, we all hiked up to Emerald Lake and then Dad and Sam and I went up to the top.  We probably shouldn't have, because we had almost no water.  I remember dragging myself slowly to the top and seeing some 8 year old kid from Colorado come bouncing along past me, completely used to the thin air.  He brought us back some water, though, so hooray for him.

That's one of the last family vacations I remember where all of us were there.  Once we got into the later parts of high school, we sometimes would stay home.  When I was 17, the rest of the family went to Western Canada to meet some of Dad's relatives, and I stayed to take some big test and to participate in some extracurricular thing.  At this point, I don't remember what was so important as to keep me home, aside from the fact that I didn't shave for a week and grew my first (horrible) goatee.  In hindsight, doesn't seem worth missing Mountain View.

When I went off to college, coming home at Christmas was my family vacation.  Then I left for the mission.  And then so did Sam and Sara and everyone else.  And then people started getting married.  I kept coming home for Christmas vacation, except for that one time the Paynes (including Roman) went to Provo instead and had that completely rad beard-growing contest that caused Dad to be embarrassed when he bumped into Ralph at the grocery store.  

I still loved coming spending my vacations with family.  And once Mom and Dad moved to Texas, these Christmas trips were a bit of an adventure, a journey to an exotic land of barbecue, big hair, and prisons.  But there were always people missing.

So I think the next time all of us got together for a family vacation might have been the Payne reunion in Las Vegas in 2008.  I burned a mix CD for the road and drove down with David and Lenny from Provo.  James and Regent took a separate trip, I think.  Mom rented a big condo for all the married folks and their families, and the single boys crashed in a nearby hotel.   Red rocks, hot dogs, and the Strip.  That was a good time.  More recently, we've mustered the whole clan for three wedding-themed Payne family vacations, the last of which was my very favorite gathering of all time.  

I don't know when we'll all be together again, but I do know that Dad and Mom knit together a family that loves one another (and serves one another).  We keep finding excuses to get together, whether all at once or in little groups, because we like each other.  And that love and friendship is part of the legacy of all those vacations.  Which makes all those hours in the van a small price to pay. 

Happy birthday, Dad!  We love you!

From Sam: 

Ah memories of vacations.  I have lots of great memories of vacations, although I can’t be certain that the events are properly correlated.  There were so many trips to Utah that I can’t keep them straight.  I don’t, for example, remember which of the many cabin trips was the one where John lost his black Swiss Army knife, and whether that was the same on where James fell off Roger’s horse, or if that coincided with my building the deck railing for the cabin.  I know that we went to the cabin often, which is something I still continue to do.  It is a place that I will always cherish.

There are lots of trips that happened when I was younger that I don’t really remember much from, aside from the fact that we went as a family and that I had fun. On one trip, presumably to the east coast, we stopped at Uncle Richard’s house in Nashville.  I remember that they had a big house, but no beds for the kids, and that their back yard was huge. I remember Mesa Verde and climbing up the antique ladders into their cliff city.  That would probably scare me now, but I was too young to care.  I remember the great Sand Dunes, and playing in a little river that we found.  I remember going to Washington DC and sneaking up into his hotel room.  He told us that we could not all go up at once or it would attract the attention of the valet.  That was the same trip where we went out in the city at night and Dad had John and I flank Sara to protect her at night.  Some people playing chess in the park at Dupont Circle obviously understood what was happening and decided to play a prank on us.  One came sneaking up from behind and tapped Sara on the shoulder.  She jumped and so did the rest of us.  I remember him laughing and saying “you must be more careful when you come to the city.”

The vehicle that I remember is the van.  I know that we went on vacations before the van, but that is the car that I remember.  It was well prepared as the vacation machine.  Mom had sewn seat covers with lots of pockets for books and games. We had a Coleman cooler that fit perfectly between the front seats and provided a nice stand for the TV/VCR that plugged into the cigarette lighter.  What an amazing invention.   Dad had created a platform in the back that sat on top of the wheel wells. Luggage went beneath and there was a nice place to sleep on top. We would pile that space up with blankets and sleeping bags for when someone got tired (of sitting next to their brother). I miss the days of not being required to wear a seatbelt.  Road trips take forever, but it goes a little bit faster if you can sleep off an hour or two.  Living in the Midwest, far from any family or attraction, I got used to driving for vacations.  I still love driving.

The longest vacation ever started when we moved to Emporia.  For one reason or another we could not find a home to purchase and ended up in student housing.  After an attempt to fit all of us in one apartment, we decided to take the rest of the summer off and go to Utah while Dad worked and tried to find a home.  It was during this vacation, I think, that I noticed that the van tape player didn’t work quite right.  The speed of the tape player matched the speed of the van.  The tapes played the right tempo when we were going 65, but climbing those Rockies sometimes the van could not quite maintain 65.  So when the speed dropped, the songs slowed down.  Regardless of the cassette player’s function, this is the trip where I started to like the Beatles.  There were two cassette tapes with the Beatles songs on them.  I think that Sara recorded them off the radio station while still in Springfield.  These songs played for a lot of the trip.  There are still some Beatles songs that make me think of the mountains.

It was also this vacation where the van quit out on one of the tight switchbacks somewhere in the Rockies and we needed to take off the front panel to get at the right piece of the engine.  We didn’t have any tools with us, but we found a screwdriver on the side of the road. Later on in the trip, we went to hike Timpanogos and the van died.  Mom and John walked a few miles to call for a tow while the rest of us waited by the roadside.  Then we all climbed into the tow truck cab and drove back into town.  It was at the end of this trip that I got left behind at a McDonalds in McPherson.  I came out of the bathroom to see the van pulling out of the parking lot.  I ran after it as it left and went out onto the highway.  On the freeway on-ramp, I realized that I could not catch up to it, and turned back.  A kind McDonald’s employee noticed what had happened and called the police to come help.  They offered me anything on the menu, but I was in such shock that I only asked for a drink of orange juice. When the police arrived they asked for a description of the car, which I was fortunately able to give.  They raced down the highway to get mom, but she had like a 20 minute head start.  In the mean time, they took me to the police station.  I hung out in some planning room that was decorated with confiscated weapons.  There were of throwing stars, batons, guns, and knives covering the walls. I had never seen real throwing stars before.  They offered me anything I wanted from their vending machines, but the shock will still overwhelming and I still had my orange juice from McDonalds, so I just sat in this room (alone).  It took probably an hour from them to catch up to mom, she was nearly to Emporia.  And then she had to drive all the way back.  So I was there in the police station for a long time. 

Other vacations that I remember include the Disney trip where we stayed in the park RV camp rounds.  It was a great vacation.  I remember getting to the park right at the opening and running to a ride, Thunder Mountain. The lines must have been really short that day, because I we rode it 3 or 4 times in a row, all within 10 minutes. They made us go out the exit and then race around through the turnstiles and get back into a car. There was almost no one else there.

I also remember smaller vacations to St. Louis or Memphis. I don’t know if those count as vacations, because we may not have spent the night, but they were still fun.  I loved visiting St. Louis because of the Arch, the zoo and the riverboat McDonalds. Once when I was in college we were there in St. Louis and I got to go to the Old Courthouse.  It is a beautiful old building in downtown right next to the arch. Adjacent to it is some weird neo-classical park/amphitheater that is meant to be like the Parthenon.

When John was going into the MTC, I remember that we were going to drive out and meet him. We got in the van and started the drive from Emporia to Provo, but somewhere at the western edge of Kansas Dad got really sick and we pulled into a small hospital where they said that he needed to get to a real hospital immediately.  I think that the options were Denver or Kansas City.  The trip was cancelled as they put dad in an ambulance and drove him back across Kansas.  Mom gave me the keys and said, “drive us home.”  I thought it was strange when I passed the ambulance an hour later on the interstate.  Why weren’t they going like 85?  I certainly was.

Speaking of driving too fast, I recall driving back from Provo to Texas in the M1 (old Buick).  Mom, John, D2 and I drove back in two days.  We started on a Saturday and drove to somewhere near the New Mexico/Texas border.  We had hoped to stay in a reasonable town that had a real hotel.  But when we got there, it was about 10pm and all the rooms were taken. Out in the vast nothingness that is the southwest, our only real option was to keep driving.  After about an hour we saw a small roadside motel.  We checked in and then went to our room.  That is when we noticed that there were bullet holes in the walls and what looked like blood to match.  I’m not sure that we slept much that night.  We got on the road pretty early.  After driving for a while it was about the time that church might start as we entered some town just across the Texas border.  It was approaching 9AM and we happened to find the church really easily.  I don’t remember how, because this was in the days before cell phone mapping and everything.  But we did find it and walked in right as Sacrament Meeting in the small branch was starting. It was a wonderful reminder of rural Texas.  The main speaker sat up front fiddling with a toothpick.  When it was his turn to talk, he simply tucked it behind his ear as one might do with a pencil.  After the meeting, we stayed for a moment to talk with the members.  When I asked how long it would take to get to Dallas, the response was, “It might take you 8 hours.  Then again it might take you 6.”  It took me no time to realize that people in west Texas like to speed.  I was the one who did most of the driving for the whole trip, and I started us out leaving church on the way home.  After driving for a while, a large caravan passed us.  I pulled out to pass a car and got in line at the end of the caravan.  I don’t remember how long I was following them, but it might have been an hour or two.  Time and miles were just flying by.  Then we saw police lights on the other side of the highway.  The caravan (which had been staying in the left lane the whole time) immediately slammed on their breaks and got over into the right lane.  I checked my speedometer as I breaked and noticed numbers coming down out of the 110’s.  The Buick’s engine was so big and smooth that I had no idea we were going that fast.  Anyways, the policeman pulled over the first car in the caravan, and then rest of us calmly went 75 for a while.

As an adult, I remember a special moment when we were in Utah, perhaps for my sister-in-law’s wedding, and Dad met us at the cabin.  Harrison was still very young.  What I remember best is just sitting at the edge of the river throwing in rocks, Harrison and me and dad.  Three generations of boys just throwing rocks, so simple and calming. 

From Dan: 

From James: 

From David: