La familia's summer vacation

By: LOUISE ESOLA - Staff Writer | Friday, July 29, 2005 11:03 PM PDT ∞

Early 19th-century author Elbert Hubbard, whose name I agree sounds kind of funny, once said that no man needs a vacation so much as the man who just had one.

This couldn't be more true for my Uncle Rolando ---- a cross between Rodney Dangerfield and Pancho Villa ---- who worked long hours saving lives as a fast-paced emergency-room doctor.

A hard-working individual, it was around this time every year that he exchanged his lab coat and dingy green scrubs for fashionably unexplainable pastel and plaid get-ups for a weeklong vacation to a gorgeous resort in the woodsy mountains of Pennsylvania.

This summer holiday promised long, sun-filled, restful days of leisurely wading, dining, golfing and lathering on gobs of insect repellent.

All this sounds quite wonderful for my dear, well-deserving Uncle Rolando, right?

Well, not exactly.

What I have so far omitted is that this uncle and his lovely wife, Maria, had in tow their six children, piles of luggage, bulk-purchased groceries and, last but not least, their hearts of pure, generous, diamond-studded gold, which ... Tadah! Surprise! ... came in the form of everyone else's children.

When it came time for the summer trip, the couple adhered to one of the noble standards of this great nation's military forces: Leave no one behind.

This wouldn't be so bad had la familia not adopted the reproduction habits of field mice and stray rabbits. But everyone met their Roman Catholic, Latin American quota of having no less than four to six children in the life span of a fashion blunder.

Yes, in the time of Christmas green bell-bottoms and powder-blue butterfly collars, la familia had reproduced into a new generation of 23 brothers, sisters, and cousins combined.

When summer vacation time came, I was one of such children who every summer found themselves caught in the middle of a game of squeeze the lemon in one of the hatchbacks, minivans, and station wagons caravanning towards the picturesque, glorious, peaceful ---- until we got there ---- countryside.

A two-hour voyage for most, it took la familia double that time thanks to unsynchronized bathroom breaks, misplaced road maps, and ongoing, irresolvable disputes that had much to do with someone's foot, leg, head, hand, etc. touching someone else's, and could somebody, for crying out loud, tell them to stop?!

Such logistics remind me of a popular circus act featuring 10 clowns piling into a vehicle no bigger than a 1967 Volkswagen bug. Sure, any highway patrolman reading this would suggest some sort of vehicle occupancy violation and endangering the lives of the children, and so on.

But we always made it there safely, I guess all thanks to our grandmother Mamita praying the rosary, in loud, 100-mph Spanish, the entire trip.

Upon reaching our destination, we children dashed into the air-conditioned, two-bedroom house to roll out our sleeping bags and blankets on a suitable place to sleep for the next six nights.

This event closely resembled the great Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, when pioneers ran like the dickens to pound a stake into a stretch of free land.

For if we the children, with the same survival instincts of cockroaches when the lights come on, did not immediately claim a small stretch of space on the floor, couch, or cubby, there was a pretty good chance we would get stuck sleeping on the floor close to our grandmother's bed, whence came the snore that could drown out the sounds of 10,000 crickety crickets.

So for one week, what was meant to be a family vacation more closely resembled an overpopulated summer camp operated by the lady who lived in a shoe. But I admit, this poor city girl's only taste of a summer getaway sure was as fun as a Slurpee on a hot day.

In droves, we went swimming, did crafts, spilled spaghetti sauce on the kitchen floor, explored the woods, ate pizza and ice cream, drank Kool-Aid, watched television, played hide and seek amid tiny bushes of poison ivy, and made appointments to use the bathroom.

Each night my uncle, after spending his days playing hide and seek with golf balls, conducted roll call to make sure no one had been eaten by a lion, tiger, or bear.

As one might suspect, the snug ride back to hometown Philadelphia was somewhat complicated by us children being sunburned, mosquito-bitten, knee-skinned and, of course, poison-ivyed.

And behind the wheel, my good-hearted Uncle Rolando sat. There, as two children fought over the last Twinkie and someone spilled sticky Hawaiian Punch on the floor, he must, just must have been thinking: Aruba. Jamaica. Boy, I need to call my travel agent.

Staff writer Louise Esola covers Oceanside schools. She can be reached at lesola@nctimes.com.