My Worst Family Vacation Ever
The horrors of traveling with small children PLUS Capote's Swans, Kate vs Meghan, and more!
December 2022
THIS IS THE time of year when families begin to plan their winter vacations – or at least the more disorganized do. If you are a family with small children, you most likely fall in the latter category. And anyone who has attempted to take a pleasant, relaxing vacation with small children knows it can’t be done. The children aren’t entirely to blame. Travel has sadly declined since the days of great ocean liners. Gate agents baldly lie, flights are canceled without warning, waiting lounges resemble Moroccan bazaars, and airline personnel become legally blind in the vicinity of anyone struggling with a folding stroller, a baby, and a diaper bag.
Traveling with children reduces you not just to a lower class but a lower caste. Certain types of resorts won’t take you. You are relegated to eat in places that are self-serve, have booster seats available, and “sneeze guards” covering the salad bars. The wise simply give up trying to take a holiday until their kids are older. I grew up in Canada, however, where a winter holiday – or escape, as Canadians more aptly call it – is considered as necessary as vinegar on chips. There is a wind that kicks in about the beginning of February, whose only purpose seems to be to remind you that just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get colder, it can. You step outside the door, the snow is blowing sideways down the street, and this wind races up your nostrils like two jabbing ice picks. It causes, too, a temporary amnesia about what a bad idea family vacations with very young children are.
When I last felt this amnesia, it was the mid-1990s. My husband, David, and I were living in Toronto with our son and daughter, then aged two and four. To get them out of the house, you’d have to dress them like Neil Armstrong going for a moon walk. Even then, the second they were out the door, they’d cry and plead to come back in. You begin noticing the ads for the Bahamas on passing buses, with their promises of bargain pricing ….
The winter previous, we’d gone to a spartan inn on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Its chief appeal was that you could rent a small suite, so you didn’t have to share a bedroom with your children. It was also cheap. We’d arrived with high hopes, sucking in the warm salty air and pointing out the palm trees. Then, after a week of bad weather, ear infections, near drownings, relentless whining, greasy hamburgers, fights over rubber alligators, and hours pacing up and down airport terminals with a stroller, we vowed never, ever to do this again.
But come February, and that wind, we were overcome with forgetfulness. We did something wrong last year. This year we will get it right. And then there would be that bus ad for the Bahamas, spraying up gray slush as it passed ….
“Have you tried Club Med?” the travel agent asked when I called her during a blizzard. “They have great programs for kids.”
Until that moment, I’d sneered at Club Meds. Just because I am a miserable, juice-stained wretch traveling with children doesn't mean I’m an all-inclusive, packaged-vacation sort of person. But as the agent described the Club Med on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas, where the weather would be more reliably hot than in Florida but the plane ride nearly as short, it occurred to me that when you have kids you discover you are a lot of things you thought you weren’t. Like an all-inclusive, packaged vacation sort of person. David reacted more skeptically. “Think about it,” I pressed. “We dump the kids in the programs. Then we spend the day on the beach reading and playing tennis. We have done that in years.”
SO WE PAID in advance and shortly found ourselves on the plane to Eleuthera, via Miami. Our plane was late, so we missed our connection. Our luggage vanished. A Club Med representative at the airport told us there was nothing she could do except book us on the 7 a.m. flight leaving the next day. There were no other flights that day. She suggested this without glancing at our children, already ripping each other to shreds in their double stroller. We spent the first night of our paid vacation in a seedY Travelodge near the Miami airport, with the kids jumping on the bed.
The next morning we arrived bleary-eyed in Eleuthera. The sky was a bit overcast but no worry! The humid, thick air smelled pungently tropical. “Look, kids! Palm trees!” Our luggage had even reappeared and was waiting for us in the terminal. After standing in line for 40 minutes to have our documents processed by a Bahamian official, who took the threat of illegal Canadian immigration to his island very seriously, we climbed into a wobbly taxi. A tire blew as soon as we were safely in the middle of nowhere. No worries! The driver had a very bald spare. Eventually we wobbled through the gates of Club Med.
“Now we can relax,” I said hopefully.
A fit, blonde man raced up to the taxi to greet us.
“Hiya Dave! I’m Ron! Welcome to Club Med!” He took us to a table near a pool-bar complex that included a small stage; a workout class was taking place with pulsing music blasting from a speaker. Ron passed “Dave” an enormous stack of forms to fill out while I ran interference with the kids, who were suddenly determined to drown themselves.
“There is only salt water in the rooms, so drink bottled water,” Ron was saying. “And you’ll want to exchange your money for beads, which you can use to buy drinks.”
He looked at us. “Have you ever been to a Club Med?”
We shook our heads.
“You’ll find our philosophy is different from other resorts.” Ron’s sunny bro-ness turned distinctly bureaucratic. “There’s an information meeting held every day at two o’clock, right here by the pool. The team leader will answer any questions you might have.”
Take a meeting? I wondered. On holiday?
Ron then led us what felt like several miles through grim, concrete-block, low-rise buildings painted in bright colors – “Soviet Tropical” – to where our rooms were located. He told us our suitcases would be dropped at an outside “depot” about 50 yards from our door. We could pick them up there and haul them to the room ourselves. There were no luggage carts nor much else, as we discovered, opening the door to two meanly furnished, connected rooms with sagging beds.
“No televisions, no phones, and no newspapers!” a welcome brochure cheerfully informed us. This would encourage us to fully disconnect from the outside world. There would also be no room service: All meals were to be eaten collectively at large tables in the central dining hall, to underscore the egalitarian spirit of Club Med. The club’s founder, a Belgian socialist named Gerard Blitz, believed that humanity could be made equal if everyone dressed in “a bathing suit and beads.”
I read this aloud to David, who was sitting on the edge of a bed looking increasingly despondent. The kids were tearing through the rooms, frantically searching for a TV.
“This isn’t Club Med,” he muttered. “It’s Club Red.”
AND INDEED IT was. At a time when even Cuban hotels had begun to mimic Hiltons, Club Med resorts in the ‘90s may have been the last outlets where the sentimental could experience socialism. Socialism, that is, as envisioned by a Belgian. Good coffee, good cheese, bad plumbing (salt water showers, no baths – try that on a two year old!), and a truly backward phone system. Remember, we only had very basic cell phones then – and they certainly did not work on an island without a network. If you were desperate to make a call, you had to go to the resort’s office where a receptionist would place the call for you – unless she was on her morning break, lunch break, afternoon break - or the time had passed 3 pm and the office had closed for the day. And we were frequently desperate: the vacation was taking place right when we were in the middle of negotiations for our first house. It hadn’t occurred to us that a hotel would not have room phones.
On our first full day, we tried to make the best of it. We dumped our hapless children in the Club Med equivalent of Young Pioneers, played a round of tennis, and then picked up the kids on our way to lunch. Our little son rushed to my legs and clung to them, wailing. The central dining hall was a vast structure built of concrete and glass, brightly lit, and clattering with the noise of 500 trays and sets of cutlery. Screeching children darted around the buffet tables like howler monkeys. The food itself reminded me of the trips I’d made as a reporter to communist countries before the revolutions of 1989: scrawny parts of chicken resting in pools of fat; filets of fish hardened and curling at the edges; dried out mounds of rice and beans; bins of wilted, vinegar-soaked salads.
All the tables seated at least eight, and everything was of course self-serve. So once you’d used your children as marking stones for chairs, you ventured to another section of the hall to load up your trays (one trip for the kids, another for each of us separately). By the time you returned to the table, another family would be sitting opposite (“Hi, I’m Bob, and this is my wife, Jill. And this cryin’ one here is Little Bob. How y’all doing?”). However nice or interesting these total strangers might be didn’t matter: It was impossible to make small talk in that cavernous room with the thousand interruptions of small children distrusting the food set before them. (“What’s this?” “I don’t like it.” “I want chicken nuggets. CHICKEN NUGGETS!”)
“I think I need a strong margarita.”
“We need more beads.”
On our second day, the weather turned bad and stayed that way for the next five days. Heavy tropical winds battered umbrellas and blew sand sideways down the beach. Our children refused to return to the kids’ program (despite the fact that staff were letting them watch the television that was forbidden in our rooms). Our son began screaming whenever we neared the little day-care cottage like a Vietnam veteran having flashbacks, and our daughter ignored our pleas to coax him inside.
We were trapped. There was nowhere to sit and read except for the smelly, uncomfortable rooms. When the wind let up for a bit, we tried sitting next to the frigidly cold pool until some overly enthusiastic staff member brought out his microphone, switched on the pulsing music, and tried to cajole everyone into a “sun dance.” If you were lucky enough to be there without children you could at least slump all day at the bar.
At one point I asked the front desk if there was somewhere else on the island we might take the children to? A crocodile farm? A petting zoo? An aquarium? A McDonalds? I was told I should have raised that question during the information meeting.
In that pre-internet era, there was no Googling for local tourist attractions. You were pretty much hostage to guide books, if you’d thought to bring one. It wasn’t until Day Three that we discovered the island’s single tiny town was within walking distance – and there we found a seaside restaurant serving fresh fish (and chicken nuggets!). Our waitress responded with a disapproving look when we told her we were staying at the nearby Club Med.
“You escaped, did you?” a man called out from the bar.
Turns out the waitress had worked there a few years back and was unimpressed with its vision of “Life As It Should Be,” as the club’s slogan went. For her – as with the other residents of the island – it translated into “No Tips for Locals.” The all-inclusive concept discouraged guests from venturing outside the confines of the resort (yep). Meanwhile, she warned us not to be fooled by the club’s superficial egalitarianism. The Bahamian housekeepers, busboys, and cooks were not permitted to mingle with guests, in the way that Ron and the other activities personnel (double yep). As we walked back from town, I noticed a huge satellite dish at the far end of the resort, no doubt bringing cable TV to the commandant and his favored staff. They probably even had their own phones.
When at last we returned to Canada, the icy wind suddenly didn’t seem so bad. “Look, kids! Snow!” We’d missed another plane in Miami, our luggage had gotten lost again, and, of course, our son had come down with an ear infection, causing him to cry throughout the flight.
The children fell upon the television the moment we got in the door. David and I poured ourselves glasses of wine and sat peacefully in the kitchen, without having to introduce ourselves to strangers or make small talk.
MANY YEARS HAVE passed since that memorably bad vacation. In the interim, we’ve had a third child (a daughter), now a sophomore in college. The little boy who clung to my legs just got married. Our eldest daughter is exactly the same age as I was on that vacation. And we moved to Washington, D.C. shortly afterwards, to the house we negotiated over the Club Med office phone. Three decades later, we still live there. Club Med was bought (perhaps fittingly) by a Chinese conglomerate in 2013. It jettisoned its Utopian mission and now operates like any chain of resorts. The Eleuthera location is no longer part of its portfolio (maybe they sold it to Venezuela).
I’d like to say to current parents traveling with small children that I’m nostalgic for those days – and I am, kind of. There was always some sympathetic elderly person at the airport who would gaze at the kids and say wistfully, “It goes by so fast.” (I would think to myself, “Not bloody fast enough.”) As the children grew older, our family trips became more ambitious, the destinations more interesting, and thus that much more enjoyable for David and me. It helped, too, that the kids could finally go to the bathroom by themselves.
Even still, when February comes and the pop-up ads for the Bahamas start populating my social media feeds, an amnesia comes briefly over me … and then I think better of it.
Don’t Miss Our Holiday Edition!
WHEN A LITTLE girl dreams of becoming a princess, a lot of her focus is on the dress, shoes, tiara, future castle, etc. The prince is usually an incidental figure. Ditto any of the more tiresome public duties associated with the role. The late Queen Elizabeth was often praised for her stoic ability to appear cheerful about anything, even the opening of a bridge. If she had complaints about the job, you never heard them.
Kate Middleton has faithfully modeled herself on the Queen’s behavior. Sure the dresses are nice and she’s got some pretty clutch jewels. Her prince seems handsome and decent enough. One day she will occupy Buckingham Palace herself as queen. But few little girls would accept the “happily ever after part” that requires a relentless commitment to duty and non-stop service to others. No matter how worthy but dull the engagement, the princess must appear delighted to be there. She’s never permitted to say anything even a little bit interesting. When insulted she must smile graciously and not reply. It may seem old-fashioned in this reality TV world to suppress one’s thoughts and feelings, let alone keep mum about one’s in-laws from hell – but aren’t those the very qualities we should be celebrating at a time when everyone else keeps losing it?
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Really great story! Brightened my morning. Thanks!
I remember those days without nostalgia. Very funny story!