Book # 9 is
Family Travel: The Farther You Go, The Closer You Get (edited by Laura Manske). Great book, please excuse the poor photo above. But more on that later. We've been busy . . . with family! We've had a lot of great family visits lately. Being way out here in Ottawa, we don't see family as often we'd like. It's usually famine but this past month, it's definitely been feast time.
First, Ted's Mom (Carol) came for a visit in October.
This was followed by a visit from my own Mom (Dodie). In fact, the two Nanas (as they both like to be called) actually overlapped for one day and one night.
One of the highlights of my Mom's visit was that she
may have passed on her Scrabble passion to Mitchell . . . we had a few good games until little brother Jackson decided to pick up the board, causing letter tiles to spill all over the floor. This led to fisticuffs between the boys and the use of words by some of us that have yet to be printed in the Scrabble dictionary . . .
And another fantastic family event . . . my niece Tenille was recently married in a small, private ceremony to a great guy named Sean. My sister Sue helped organize a reception for them and I was so glad I was able to attend. Here are some pics from that fun family gathering . . . Tenille is a wonderfully unique girl, her hubby Sean will certainly never be bored.
And just for fun, here are a few Halloween pics. Mitchell was Link from Legend of Zelda. Jackson was a football player (Cincinnati Bengals, mostly because he was partial to the tiger stripes on the helmet).
And now, about the book. This is not a guide book, not a work of fiction, not a how-to manual on family travel. Rather, it is a collection of 45 personal essays - some sad, some poignant, some hilarious - that share the theme of travel as a way to reconnect and revitalize a family. Some authors are familiar names such as Paul Reiser, Mary Morris, Michael Crichton and Calvin Trillin. My favourite essay in this collection is called "Honolulu Mamas" by Robert Strauss, about a son who takes both his mother and mother-in-law on a trip to Hawaii. He's a great writer - here's an excerpt:
"I had no idea what we would do for five days. More importantly, I had no idea if our mothers would get along. My mother-in-law is a firebrand who marched through the streets of Berkeley in the sixties. At the slightest hint of any injustice done to anyone anywhere in the world, her first comment is likely to be, "The bastards!" A piece of plastic litter blowing down the street will start her off on a crusade against the multinational petroleum companies ("The bastards!"). On the plane to Hawaii she insisted we hang on to the sandwich bag and other plastic items for recycling on the mainland. I still haven't found the courage to tell her that, on occasion, I have voted Republican. My mother, on the other hand, can't stand confrontation. "Isn't that a shame" or "Isn't that awful" or "Someone ought to look into that" are about the strongest comments she can muster about something like, for example, the Chernobyl disaster.
Mom has spent thousands of hours in the beauty salon. My wife's mother washes her own hair and leaves styling to the wind. She grew up eating spicy Middle-Eastern food. Anything more daring than a boiled chicken breast send my mother to the gastroenterologist. As the plane approached Honolulu, this family vacation in Hawaii was looking more and more like a tsunami about to wash ashore."Funny stuff. I highly recommend this book, whether family travel is in your imminent future or not.
