Family Tourism

We just got back from a two-week family trip to Switzerland and England.

We’ve taken our kids to Europe one other time, in 2019, a year that felt light and cheery at the time and a year that, in hindsight, given all that came after it, feels even lighter and even cheerier, and in ways, possibly made up.

Still, when we took off for that trip, we were nervous. Even straightforward travel felt crooked and scary with our youngest. We worried—would sleepless flights and profound jet lag and thrown-off medication schedules be seizure triggers? Would we go to great lengths to get somewhere only to end up in a dark nowhere, far from my son’s neurologist and hospital and reliable couch?

As is the case with all of life, only trying would tell. There was no way to know how elastic my youngest’s health was without stretching him, our nerves. Without risking the snap. So when we traveled, we scaffolded. We brought someone who could hawk-eye him, who could stay in an air-conditioned hotel room with him, on some other couch, if it ended up being 95 degrees outside on a touring day, a temperature his body could not abide. I know this: this is a lucky thing to be able to do. And I also know this: this created parallel vacations, the one my son was on and the one the rest of us were on.

More, it meant we were never traveling as just a family. We always had someone else with us. And no matter how beloved a person is (and hear me: we’ve had some true beloveds), another person on vacation is another person on vacation.

Now, five years later, everyone older, two no longer living at home, my youngest’s elasticity road-tested, we decided we would travel just the six of us. That on this trip we would do everything together, in marriage-vow fashion—for better or worse, in sickness or in health. We’d dial back the itinerary a little and we’d push my youngest a little and we’d prove something unprecedented: that parallels can meet and merge, transforming two separate vacations into one family trip.

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We started in Lucerne. My youngest, having slept on the plane quite expertly, landed most awake and adjusted while the rest of us walked around foggy-headed in matching weather. We went on a boat across Lake Lucerne with Roger, who’d been driving this lake his whole life, just like his father and grandfather before him.

It would prove true that on this trip (and in this life?) I would learn a lot and retain only a little. Roger told us all kinds of things as we crossed the lake, things I’m certain my family could readily recite, but here’s all that I remember: the lake is very deep. Or else it isn’t. Idk—one or the other! There are many castles along the shores of Lake Lucerne and most are no longer Swiss owned. One castle was owned by seven sisters. Another sold for under market because though perched on the water, it had no water access. Roger refurbished the boat himself with mahogany from El Salvador. We could help ourselves to the drinks and snacks in the mini-fridge!

We docked in Lucerne and got off the boat to wander aimlessly until our chocolate making class a few hours later. While wandering aimlessly can be a delightful staple of travel, it is not my youngest’s favorite and therefore not a familial core competency. Given where we’ve been, our family likes to know where we’re headed.

Still, we tried strolling like bona fide tourists, seeing a bocce tournament along the river, a wooden bridge with flower boxes along the outside and painted murals on the peaked eaves on the inside, the Church of St. Leodegar which yes, was pretty cool but as Americans I think we grade European churches on a very generous curve. Like if we walked into St. Leodegar in Des Moines we’d be like Okay. It’s nice. But because we’re in Lucerne we’re letting the candles burning and the gilded Jesus and the surplus of dead saints in the floor just floor us. Later in the trip, my younger daughter and I would walk to the first Catholic church in Interlaken, a story-book looking place from the outside, and a bare-walled box on the inside, like a function room in a Holiday Inn, probably in Des Moines.

It was Sunday and Switzerland takes Sundays quite seriously—or maybe quite unseriously which is to say not much is open and even what is open, doesn’t stay open for long. Included in the list of closed shops was the place where we were supposed to take our chocolate making class. We arrived to the door after all of our taxing wandering to find it shut, dark, very unsweet. And so alas, we returned to the States still not knowing how to make our own chocolate and there’s no saying how this will impact each of us going forward.

We ferried back to where we were staying to listen to cow bells and church bells chorusing in the drizzle and to look at the mountaintop hotel pool which sat gloomy under plinking raindrops but which would be in full sun for some other family’s vacation two days later.

We moved on the next day as we’d continue to do throughout the trip, as if we were being pursued and needed to keep eluding whoever was chasing us. We drove to Interlaken which I guess I had previously just pictured as a giant bungee jumping platform because that seemed to be what every young adult I’d ever known had gone there to do. But it was so much more than that. And also seems to have matured into more of a parasailing spot.

After checking in, we did more non-preferred wandering along the main street before finding a place that would serve one of my youngest’s main food groups: pepperoni pizza. The restaurant was themed around the Audrey Hepburn movie Roman Holiday. A drinking game centered on the mention of Audrey Hepburn in Switzerland would get you good and drunk. She lived there for thirty years and that residency seems to have earned her a deepest Swiss affection.

We had a meal as good as you’d expect at a place themed around an old movie and when we were just about done, the boys started wrestling and while I provided my usual white noise (please stop guys someone’s gonna get hurt or something’s gonna go wrong or something’s gonna spill or bottom line this is just annoying to watch so please stop guys ) they knocked a glass of milk into my oldest’s lap and critically, her sneakers. Too bad no one really listens to white noise!

No one cried exactly because of course they quite specifically say you can’t in this instance. But no one was in a very good mood either as we cleaned up, debating whose fault it was (hung jury) and just how bad the sneakers would end up smelling (very, very bad). And this happens on even the best of family vacations, right? Where togetherness snags and things feel tiring and hard and you wonder what are we even doing all together on this trip? We could be in bad moods at home!

That night going to bed, after a similarly grumbly-mooded dinner, my youngest, who would never question why we’d be on a trip all together because he wouldn’t question anything that involved being all together said, “Tomorrow will be a different day.” He meant it plainly and he was of course right: the next day is never the same as the last. But as he said good-night-I-love-you 10-12 more times before falling asleep, and then began snoring in a way that reminded me I needed to book an ENT appointment for him when we got home to see about sleep apnea, I took it deeply, as if I’d cracked open a fortune cookie to find just the right and hopeful message on the little white strip inside.

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The next day was different. We met our guide Sandra in the lobby of our hotel for a Jungfraujoch Adventure!

Our youngest handled introductions as he did throughout the trip. If the population of Switzerland is 8.8 million, we probably met a good half of it. Of course, not everyone my son introduced himself to spoke English, but language barriers are easily overcome if you aren’t super stuck on the particulars of a response. If you’re after a friendliness. If you mostly just want to get your name out there in the world.

After my son reviewed our full names, preferred nicknames, and relational context (“This is my mother Jen Parker. Her middle name is Murphy. I call her mommy.”), Sandra led us towards the train station. She was petite and spritely and unage-able (though we’d learn she was close to 70). We all wondered if she was real, so alit and such an untampered kind of beautiful, no odd reconstruction or pulling done to her face. Just a glow that over the course of the day we’d learn was from living the exact right way in a Swiss village.

Our Adventure! involved trains and gondolas, climbing to, as the posters the whole way up touted, incredible, once-in-a-lifetime views at Europe’s highest elevation. But on this lifetime shot of ours, it was rainy and overcast and so we just climbed higher and higher into more and more clouds, ascending out of both visibility and summer. Up into winter.

While Sandra told us about the villages we were passing, these mountains, that old tram, the life she’s made between these lakes, why there’s a Hooters on the Main Street of Interlaken, she remained hopeful. “Let us see what happens. Perhaps the clouds will shift. Perhaps a view when we get there.”

At the top, the clouds did part here and there, startlingly large peaks playing peek a boo with us. One minute, the view fully gray, like floating in a glass of skim milk; the next a jagged and giant face RIGHT THERE.

Our three oldest ziplined at the top, climbing a rickety ladder to an equally rickety launching platform and attaching to a line that zipped them into an invisible oblivion. My youngest wanted to do it too but we couldn’t figure out if he should or could or would, a triangulating standard of ours. We decided, as we so often do, that we couldn’t launch him if we didn’t know how he’d land. So he sat freezing in layered summer clothes in the snow, drinking a hot chocolate, watching his siblings fly by waving. I had to try not to think too hard about how often this is his view.

I left my Jungfraujoch Adventure hazy on the exact number of vertical feet we’d climbed to and the names of things we should’ve been able to see and why the water runs so green (minerals? I can always ask my husband), but I left crystal on Sandra’s life because I am a Cookie Monster for personal details. Her career as a dancer, her drummer-in-rock-bands husband, her two athletic daughters who still live in Interlaken, how she bikes everywhere she goes in the summer, how she takes the train to ski in the winter, how she kind of loved the pandemic because villagers had these mountains to themselves for once, sitting on slopes to picnic in between runs since the lodges were closed.

My youngest, an established magic whisperer, recognized in Sandra his kind and talked about her for the rest of the trip as if she would reappear any minute. We all agreed it was possible, that she could Tinkerbell down on us at another random point in the trip. Or life. Maybe all we needed to do was believe.

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It felt like whoever was pursuing us was maybe catching up so we hopped on the Glacier Express to ride to San Moritz, winding through mountains and over bridges and by rivers, the four kids seated in one section, my husband and I in our own section right behind them, traveling the way I would’ve thought we would by the time the kids were these ages, but traveling in a way that still feels surprising and new to us.

The first day, we walked to a “nearby” village. My youngest does not consider three miles nearby. He sat down on a footbridge as we reached the outskirts of the town.

“My feet are tired. The hike is OVER.”

We cajoled him by throwing imaginary Mario Kart power ups in front of him and he imaginary gulped them, getting a burst of energized walking for a few strides. And then he would slow. So we’d do it again. And then again. And again. Not after a high score; just trying to prevent a GAME OVER.

We started up a hill past shops and restaurants. School had just been let out and middle-school kids bombed downhill on scooters towards home or wherever else they might want to go—that decision appeared distinctly up to them. They didn’t wear helmets because though joyful, this wasn’t a joyride. This was just transportation. Also, you’d never feel the wind in your hair if you did.

Further up the hill, we passed an elementary school. Waist-high kids in too-big orange safety vests were walking away in groups of two and three. There was no pick up line, no parents waiting to collect them, no buses idling out front. The kids just walked out the school gate and into the world, uphill, together and protected by their vests.

I told my kids I wished I would’ve known about safety vests when they were little. It would’ve saved me so much worry if I could’ve just put one on them and by doing so, told the world to be careful of them. If I could’ve just trusted the world to get them home over and over again.

We reached the two-seater chairlift that would take us up into the glaciers. I rode with my youngest who has been on a handful of chairlifts in his life and who was acting a sort of dazed quiet that makes me worry.

We rose to stupendous views but I was preoccupied by my seat mate because living through disaster after disaster makes you a ready disaster planner. What would I do if something happened as we were suspended in the middle of this ride? Just hanging. And he is so big now—would I be able to hold and steady him if his body became stiff and uncontrollable.

We got to the top uneventfully, another wasted cortisol rush, an empty wrapper to throw on the garbage heap of those I’ve already had. And at the top there was a playground and my son popped back to animated, running the course, sliding the slide, telling us he was training.

And aren’t we all?

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As we always do when we’re presently together, we talked a lot about the past during our two weeks. A tourism within the tourism—revisiting what we’ve done, where we’ve been, who’ve we’ve been together. The memories from other trips or other years, the little details that stuck in little heads, patina-ed and now brought into the light for examining, admiring.

Given everyone’s stages—one college graduate, one done with freshman year, a rising high school senior, an 8th grader to be—we also talked a lot about the future. So many ideas and plans and hopes. Endless dreams out there running around, just waiting to be chased. And because disaster planners raise disaster planners, we also talked about dreams not coming true, inventing a category called If all goes terribly.

My youngest told us he will go to the same high school his siblings have gone to. And that he will play football. And that he will later go to the same college as his older brother. This is all more ziplining. He will not do any of these things. While there are plenty of things he just hasn’t done yet, these won’t be some of them. None of us disabused him of any of it though. In fact we agreed, or at least redirected. Yes—you’d love that high school; you know, not everyone plays football; listen, there are other colleges too.

Because with dreams, it’s less about the coming true and more about the having.

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“You will spend the majority of your life knowing your children as adults, but for a brief moment, you will get the chance to know them as kids.”

Instagram keeps sending me some variation of this because other than tracking the rise of Chappell Roan, my algorithm is specifically designed to cause me emotional turmoil. This upsetting sentence overlays a video of little kids running around in a yard or by the ocean or fishing with small rods, doing all the little kid stuff they’re born to do.

We went on so many trips when the kids were little. Not European tours, but trips to see family in Massachusetts or Washington or Idaho or Arizona or Hawaii. And little kids are cutie cute on vacation with their sippy cups and goldfish and swimmy diapers and teeny shoes. I have 35,000 pictures (!) on my phone to prove this.

But the nostalgia for what’s been and lost in raising kids can become like a disease. And if I’m deadly honest, and I don’t sit around sugar-coat-enhancing memories, I love this part more. Little kids were great, enchanted and enchanting, but older kids are better. Especially on vacation.

Because have you noticed? Little kids on vacation need frequent carrying and tending and are generally not relaxing to be around at all. Getting home from a vacation with young children has the same vibe of finishing a marathon: you’re tired, you’re sore, and here in this afterglow, you’re glad you did it but there’s no denying: parts of it hurt.

Meanwhile, older kids walk everywhere unassisted. They are conversationally surprising, sometimes argumentative, often insightful and, most critically, funny.

They are chock full of viewpoints that are now—wait for it: informed!

They bring the stories—about friends or school or memories, and the stories are cohesive and fluid, with twists and punchlines.

They notice things. They call you on stuff.

They serve as ambassadors from the Land of Young People, teaching words and ways they’d never want you to actually say or follow, but feel, as a functioning member of society, you should at least understand.

Also, they can have a cocktail!

In short, they are great company. But now, right as they become these most excellent companions, they have those futures and plans to think about and get on with. Given our kids ages, as the years keep flipping by and they exit school ages with those long summers and pre-installed vacations spread throughout the year, a questions looms: how many more trips like this will we get?

Of course, the kids aren’t thinking like this. They talk about coming back to all of these amazing places someday.

We didn’t see the proper views on JungFrau. They didn’t parasail in Interlaken and they’d meant to. We didn’t stay in any one place long enough to do everything. And what is that pool in Lucerne like in the sun?

So they’ll come back to parasail, to see the view for real. I imagine them coming back in their somedays, with their someones—friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, fiancés, spouses, kids. And though some of these people are yet unmet, or even unborn, I know any of them are more likely than me to be beside my kids the next time they’re in Switzerland.

And this trip might come up on those future trips. Just like while we traveled, my husband and I told stories of times with our parents and siblings, on trips that had felt so central and vital and nuclear, now decades behind us. Tales of our then-core family to our now-core family.

The age-old pattern of this kind of tourism.

And perhaps a view when we get there.

Jen.

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