Thinking back, my most favorite holiday was the last “big family trip” I had with my parents and sister before I started traveling on my own, with friends and, later, my future husband. It was a round the world trip – The US and Europe – booked a year and a half in advance and with a travel agency, as you did in those days. It was the trip that helped me get through my high school exams and I remember excitedly creating a scrapbook of images of the cities I would be visiting…
I’ll never forget the friendly customs lady at the LAX airport and with her strong American drawl, or the time a kid came up to my dad at Disney World with an autograph book (which he signed!), thinking he was a Disney character. Americans are so friendly – when we got lost in Burwood a lady got out of her car and spent a good amount of time instructing us on how to get back to Hollywood. We hired an Aztec Pontiac and got a surprising large number of compliments from strangers through open car windows about how cute it was! Our holiday song was “Independent Women” by Destiny’s Child and my sister and I would sing it throughout that leg our trip.
I’ll never forget Paris, eating fried rice at a Chinese restaurant elbow to elbow to the customers next to us (cuisine choice was my dad’s, of course), or buying pizza by the ounce in Italy. Or the time when the “Gladiator” outside the colosseum pretty much trapped us into taking a photo with my little sister and then when my dad gave him a tip he threw it down onto the floor with disgust (what did he expect? This is my dad we’re talking about!)
I have so many more memories of that trip, which I will forever cherish. Writing this post has made me realize how wonderful family trips are. Now that I have two little girls of my own, I hope that once we are ready to travel again, we will create our own family trip memories.
