Does Traveling with Family Stress You Out?

Three words of advice: lower. the. bar.

The first thing my jetlagged family and I did on our 2013 trip to Ireland was take a bus tour of Dublin. Although usually at the bottom of my travel “to do” list, a bus tour offered us a place to rest without danger of sleeping all day, and, bonus, we discovered places like La Pizza, my son’s favorite Dublin restaurant.

“Aim high.” “Dream big.” “Go for the gold.” There’s a lot of inspirational advice flying around during this season of graduations, weddings, and other liminal events.

But, let’s be real, folks: many of us attending such festivities are doing so in the company of family, including relatives who we either don’t have the opportunity to see, or who we don’t choose to see, regularly. Uncles who frequently mention their hemorrhoids, teenage cousins who’d rather be anywhere but here, great-aunts with grudges, open bars, and so mamy other familial factors create perfect storm conditions for epic arguments and nasty airings of grievances that can eclipse celebratory merrymaking.

Take it from me, I’ve been there, battled, and emerged angry and swearing “NEVER AGAIN” to travel with my extended family. Until, of course, I find myself traveling with them again.

Or traveling with them for the first time, which is what was stressing me out in the spring of 2013. My mother-in-law (MOL), who had never traveled overseas, wanted to visit Ireland, but only if my husband and I would go with her. We’d been planning our own trip to the Emerald Isle, but obviously we weren’t going to tell the 70-year-old, widowed woman who gave birth to my saintly husband that nah, we wouldn’t take her to her ancestral homeland.

I was stressing over the age differential—our kids were nine and eight at the time—as well as traveling overseas with my MOL, with whom I’d never gone farther than roundtrip from Queens to Manhattan. I feared that this “vacation” was going to devolve into a ten-day babysitting gig.

I became crankier and more stressed out as the trip approached. One day, I realized how pathetic and counterproductive this attitude was, and told myself to pull it together.

“After all,” I thought,” if nobody gets lost or dies, this will be a kick-ass trip.”

“That’s an awfully low bar,” myself said to myself.

“Lower the bar! That’s it! If I lower my travel expectations bar, I won’t be disappointed!” myself shouted to myself. Internally, of course.

Lower the bar, and you too may be rewarded with double rainbows of happiness.

And, guess what? Nobody died or got lost! I had a good time! I only felt like a babysitter once—no, sorry, twice! I wouldn’t go so far as to call our 2013 trip to Ireland “kick-ass,” though my now-19-year-old daughter begs to differ. From her perspective, our multi-generational trip to Dublin and Cork ten years ago was “big time” fun, notably the Malahide Castle park and the Hole in the Wall pub a few steps away from our “best ever” Airbnb, which sadly no longer is an Airbnb.

When you set your travel expectations bar as low as it will go, the fun you derive from any activity is tenfold what it would’ve been otherwise. Winning a t-shirt for answering the most questions correctly during a literary pub crawl through Dublin? One of my 2013 highlights. Waving good-bye to my mother-in-law and the kids after we hustled them into a cab so that Gabe and I could see a production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband? Delectable.

The delectability of that moment was nearly eclipsed by the sight of our children jumping up and down on the sleeper sofa, watching reality TV and eating potato chips—I mean, crisps—when we returned at midnight.

“Where’s Nana?” Gabe and I asked, scanning the room.

Oh, God, had she died and/or gotten lost?

Nana, we learned, had gone to bed hours before and left the kids to run feral around the Airbnb. But, hey, no deaths, no losses, no damage to the house, just a lot of crumbs to clean up: the evening was a win all around. And so our days in Dublin, then Cork, continued. There were some testy moments at Blarney Castle, but peace was restored brilliantly around the tea table.

As any PBS or BBC watcher knows, tea makes everything all right.

That multigenerational trip to Ireland prepared me well for the liminal event our family celebrated a couple of weeks ago: our son’s high school graduation. Said joyous occasion involved me, my husband, and our daughter, Lucia, collecting our out-of-town relatives from Boston’s Logan Airport and driving three hours (my car) or four hours (Gabe’s car) north to Bethel, Maine, where our son and an Airbnb awaited us.

For a snapshot of the situation, we’re talking three nights in an 1800-square-foot house with:

• someone who loves to talk

• someone else who loves to talk about completely different topics

• someone who doesn’t talk much, probably because he can’t get a word in

• someone who was chomping at the bit to party with his other graduating friends

• a melange of graduating friends

• two people who always behave themselves

• me. I was pinballing between reciting first one mantra (“no deaths, no losses, great trip”) then another (“Serenity now! Serenity now!”) and texting with my sister, who was reclining on her patio in New Mexico and undoubtedly raising a margarita to the fact the she was 2,200 miles and two time zones away.

After a few rocky moments early on, which I duly reported to my sister, my mother and I agreed that we wanted to go for a hike.

Now, the last time I was in Maine and mentioned wanting to hike, my son’s extremely fit and outdoorsy adviser gave my husband and me a suggested route that, while only three miles, really kicked our asses. Having learned from this experience and vowing never again to take a Mainer’s idea of “hiking” lightly, I suggested a nice meander in the appropriately-sized hills directly behind our Airbnb.

My mother, however, insisted that we figure out where the Appalachian Trail was and hike there and only there.

Here’s how the part of the AT closest to Bethel is described: “tends to be steep and boulder-strewn as it follows ridgelines through the Mahoosuc Range, providing some of its most challenging sections within Grafton Notch State Park and the Mahoosuc Public Lands.” The Appalachian Trail is 2,198.4 miles long, and my late-70s, not extremely fit or outdoorsy mother was determined to walk “some of its most challenging sections” despite my attemps to talk her out of it? Yep.

I cast aside all recent experiential learning re: hiking in Maine. If that’s the game Mommy Dearest wanted to play, I’d play it. After glancing over the hiking map at the Grafton Notch trailhead parking lot, Gabe, Lucia, my mother, and I figured that the 2.1 mile Eyebrow Loop Trail looked reasonable. I didn’t look at the elevation gain, which turned out to be about 1,600 feet, and I’m unclear on whether anyone else in my party did. What I am clear on is that we ended up breaking five of the six rules of the Hiker Responsibilty Code, a safety gaffe that I am not proud of. I apologize to the hiking community and to potential rescuers.

At least we obeyed #3. And I just obeyed #6 by sharing this with you.

While we walked—sometimes upright, sometimes with the aid of steel cables and a ladder, occasionally on our hands and knees — my mother and I joked about pushing each other over the side of the mountain. (At least, I was joking.) At one point, when my mother was gasping for breath, I considered the possibility that she might actually be dying. I panicked. When the Maine state troopers or Appalachian Trail forest rangers removed her body from Grafton Notch State Park, would they suspect foul play? Would they demand that I turn over my phone to them, the one with the text to my sister the day before stating that I might strangle my mother, words I’d written while venting about annoying comments she was making? Would I be hauled off immediately to the Bethel prison? (Does Bethel have a prison?) Or would the fact that my mother was dead but clearly not by strangulation be enough to ensure my continued freedom?

Of more immediate and serious concern, if my mother had a heart attack, we had no cell phone service and therefore couldn’t call for help. I started a mental review of CPR breath counting but stopped when I heard her chipper and not-out-of-breath voice say, “Ooh, I wonder what THIS plant is?”

Was the effort of hiking the Eyebrow Loop Trail worth it? Um, yeah.

Yes, we were total idiots who thankfully didn’t have to be rescued from the mountains of Maine—but wow, what an accomplishment! My mother and I didn’t argue. We bonded over the shared difficulty of the hike, as well as the incredible beauty surrounding us. And we didn’t get lost or die, either from natural causes or foul play.

On the way back from our challenging hike, we came across this pay-on-the-honor-system bakery with delicious apple and berry pies that helped us replace, and then some, all those calories we’d just worked off. While there, we met a very fit hiker who looked at us incredulously when we told him we’d just walked the Eyebrow Loop Trail.