Don’t leave home without these travel tips

Posted in Travel
by Lorain County Moms

By Deborah Mead, Disney FamilyFun magazine

When I booked my family’s once in-a-lifetime vacation to Maui, I planned it with a careful eye on the bottom line. Even for just the three of us — me, my husband, Keith, and our 9-year-old daughter, Veronica — this was going to be an expensive trip. I was determined to economize where I could. Get up at 3 a.m. to catch the cheapest flight? No problem. Endure a three-hour layover in Dallas to save several hundred dollars? Absolutely. Fly cramped economy class? Who cares? We’ll be carefree vacationers!

Whoopee!

But months later, as I was packing for our trip, it hit me: was I completely out of my mind? We were about to set off on a 14-hour haul, one that would start in the wee hours of the morning and would last until late at night. Let me just say that no one in my family is a model of patience, least of all young Veronica. And when one of us is tired and cranky, the bad mood spreads like a virus, with one irritable comment provoking an even more negative response. Left unchecked, the situation could easily deteriorate into relentless hours of snippiness and short tempers. This was not how I wanted to start my dream vacation.

But what to do about it? I decided that our travel stresses needed to be managed somehow, so that testiness didn’t contaminate our whole trip. Then I had an idea. I grabbed some paper and started writing: “This coupon entitles bearer to 10 minutes of whininess, irritability, poutiness, grumpiness, crankiness, sulkiness, and/or general disagreeableness.” And, in a burst of lawyerly self-preservation, I added in small print, “Void where prohibited.” I didn’t know whether I would need to invoke that clause, but I wanted to be covered, just in case.

When I showed Veronica the coupon, she laughed, then pointed out that 10 minutes might not be enough. I agreed and made more coupons, three for each of us. (Hey, Keith and I get cranky, too!)

I didn’t really expect the coupons to solve much. Like probing a toothache, there’s a strange satisfaction to be found in complaining and sulking, a temptation that would be hard to combat with just a few scraps of paper. As it turned out, though, the coupons worked just fine — if not exactly in the way I had planned.

Arriving at the airport at 4:30 a.m., we had trouble finding an open coffee shop. I noticed the early signs of exasperation on my husband’s face.

“Do you need to use a coupon?” I asked in mock disbelief. “Even Veronica hasn’t had to resort to a coupon yet!”

Veronica’s face lit up and she teased, “Yeah, Dad, do you need a coupon?”

Keith grinned. “Nope. Nothing wrong here!” We laughed, and the tension eased. Of course, finding an open coffee shop also helped.

During the second, longer leg of the flight, Veronica squirmed in her seat, trying unsuccessfully to sleep. She turned to me and said, a hint of trouble in her voice, “I think I might need a coupon.”

“OK,” I said. “But that means you’ll have only two left.”

She thought for a moment.

“Nevermind. I’m going to save them.” And she resolutely shut her eyes, eventually managing to sleep for a couple of hours.

Landing in Maui, I felt the tension in my neck and shoulders growing as I stood in line for 45 minutes at the car rental agency. “What’s the point of having a reservation if I have to wait in a line like this!”

I wanted to scream. I glanced back to the seats along the wall, where my husband and Veronica were waiting. Making smug faces, they teasingly waved a coupon in my direction. But wait:

I was the one who brought up this whole grumpiness issue in the first place. There was no way I was going to be the first one to crack! I pulled myself up straighter, took a few deep breaths and amused myself with mental reruns of the Seinfeld car rental episode. (“You know how to take the reservation. You just don’t know how to hold the reservation.”)

After 14 hours, two flights, three airports, and what felt like hours of waiting in lines, we were all relieved to get to our hotel — coupons still unused and tempers in check. In fact, the coupons had worked so well, we continued to deploy them — or, more accurately, not deploy them — for the rest of our vacation. Small setbacks popped up almost daily: the mechanical problem with our rental car, the rain clouds that grounded our helicopter ride, the mudslide that forced us to cancel our drive along Maui’s renowned coastal road. (I admit, that last one was particularly hard for me.)

But instead of wasting our precious vacation time being grouchy, we began to treat these moments as opportunities to joke and laugh and prove to each other, and ourselves, how even-tempered and optimistic we could be. By the end of the trip, none of us had used a single coupon, a feat that astounds me still. Who would have thought that those little scraps of paper would prove to be so powerful?

But they did. In fact, not only did they assist us in keeping the peace on our vacation, they also helped us learn some lasting lessons about ourselves and our capacity for self control.

Unforeseen obstacles are inevitable in life — but bad moods are not. Sulking about minor inconveniences is a choice, we realized, one that becomes increasingly easy not to make if you’re determined to stay upbeat.

Of course, back at home in the real world, we still get out of sorts sometimes. I don’t whip out the coupons when Veronica grumbles about her homework — or when I feel my own stress level start to rise. I suspect the coupons would lose their special powers if we used them every day. Instead, I’m holding onto them for our next trip. In the meantime, they’re a great souvenir of a truly incredible family vacation.