Horror is embedded in our everyday lives, even if it looks different from Michael Myers chasing someone down the street. Even seemingly mundane things can spark fear and terror, especially in the hearts of parents, like a favorite stuffed animal gone missing or being asked to volunteer for a school function. I write books about these everyday horrors, and then add in supernatural phenomena to turn up the dial. Whether it be sending a demon to a cul-de-sac to explore the suburban politics of the PTA mom crowd—something that’s already terrifying—or uniting a coven of witches to probe the delicate balance of keeping up appearances.
My new book, Nightmare of a Trip, tackles one of the most frightful of familial rites of passage: an extended, family road trip for summer vacation. It centers around the Somerset family, who road trips from Milwaukee to Magic Land, a theme park in Orlando, and picks up a ghost along the way. Anyone brave enough to go on a vacation with children is well aware of the potential horrors—and that’s before adding in any ghosts.
For starters, lodging can be hit or miss. Growing up, my family rented a charmingly “rustic” cottage in southeast Wisconsin for one week a year, about a two hour drive from our Chicago suburb. By rustic, I mean air-conditioning was a pipe dream, spiders shared every corner, and a trip to the water meant a dangerous trek down a comically steep flight of rickety wooden stairs. One year, I slept on a box spring because the previous renter had burned down the mattress while smoking in bed. The only television we had was a small, black-and-white model missing the knob for volume, so we had to adjust it with the end of a pencil eraser.
A trip somewhere remote also risks being cut off from civilization. The closest restaurant to our cottage was the definition of a dive bar, complete with an owner who had Seen Things and two giant, extremely unfriendly dogs that patrolled the inside. My favorite element was the cigarette vending machine, where I spent too much time pulling on the handles while my parents sat at a table. Nevertheless, our week at the Wisconsin cottage was my favorite time of the year, a vacation enshrined in the view granted by my rose-colored glasses.
While stationing somewhere remote can be dicey, taking the family on the road also ups the ante. After the cottage’s owner chose to stop renting it out, my family pivoted to a road trip from our suburban Chicago home to South Carolina’s Lowcountry. We piled into our maroon station wagon with the turtle top affixed to the roof and began the 18 hour trip south. This was before the time of smartphones and WiFi, before Google Maps and Expedia hotel reviews, so we had only our trusty TripTik from AAA to guide us through the Smoky Mountains.
Our first overnight stop was at a motel somewhere in Kentucky where the beds had slots for quarters and the indoor hot tub—enclosed in what was essentially a wooden shed—was available for a dip, if you pre-paid by the hour. (I remember we asked our parents why someone would need a bed that vibrates, and they gave a vague answer about a massage to help someone fall asleep. Indeed.) We did pay for an hour of hot tub usage, only to get accidentally locked inside the wooden shed. When we were finally rescued by the front desk clerk, she asked us to pay for the extra minutes we spent inside. Our only salve was that our parents took us to breakfast at Cracker Barrel—the pinnacle of our road trip.
That trip will forever exist in family lore, from the infamy that arises when a family is thrown into a ridiculous situation yet still maintains humor. It was our family’s National Lampoon’s Vacation, sadly minus Cousin Eddie. When I began writing Nightmare of a Trip, I wanted to encompass all of the hilarity and hijinks of that family road trip with the addition of the terror of picking up a ghost along the way. With that creative license, I gave a Cousin Eddie to the Somerset family.
I was also able to include my experience of road tripping now as a parent, thanks to a vacation that arose from willful ignorance. When my husband and I decided to road trip with our three kids from Chicago to South Carolina, I envisioned a nostalgic 1980s road trip, forgetting the hot tub crisis and the mechanical motel room beds. We drove on the same route that my family had taken decades ago, and even used the exact same turtle top for our SUV, a relic that had somehow survived all of my parents’ bouts of decluttering. We proudly displayed it on our car, certain it wouldn’t cause us any problems. We got about five miles from home before it broke and slid off the roof.
For our overnight stay in Appalachia, we chose an indoor water park. While I can’t explain the logic of choosing such a place to sleep, I can confidently say it was one of those mistakes that you remember forever. During our stay, my husband emerged from the lazy river at the waterpark with someone else’s used band aid stuck to his foot. We also had to evacuate the premises because a diaper exploded in the wave pool.
We attempted the same salve my parents had: taking our kids to breakfast at a Cracker Barrel. I quickly discovered that my kids aren’t as easily bribed as my siblings and I were. So, thus, Cracker Barrel became part of our family’s lore, but in the opposite way. The five of us survived the trip, and had some great moments, but that was the first and last time we attempted a road trip.
While reliving all of those moments of family horror, I realized that while we had taken nicer, fancier vacations, we rarely talk about those. We might reminisce in passing, but the discussion generally ends there. The laughs, the stories, the memories, are all reserved for the trips that were sprinkled with disaster and discomfort. If the purpose of the great family vacation is to have shared bonding, there’s nothing like trauma bonding over being locked in a hot tub shed or battling biohazards at a waterpark. While I don’t know if my family will ever attempt another road trip, our brief brush with the open road and endless car snacks has given us more laughs and memories than almost anything else. Stay tuned to find out if the Somerset family feels the same way.
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