A New Vacation Destination: Family

Growing up as the only child of two Type-A New Yorkers, my experiences with family vacations weren't what you could really call relaxing. Trips were as carefully planned and tightly coordinated as a military strike. See this. Watch that. Eat there. Go. Go. Go.

No matter how fast we lived, no matter where we went, there were just three of us -- Mom, Dad, and me. Together, usually in the comfort of my Mother's 1991 Oldsmobile Calais, we saw every nook of the Maine coast, Cracker-Barreled our way through the South, and drove the Pacific Coast Highway up and down three times.

Today, however, my family vacations are very different. For starters, as a travel writer, I actually get paid to come up with destinations and activities. Since my wedding in June 2004, my changing family has further transformed my trips. I now live in California, some 3,000 miles from my parents, so the closest family members belong to my wife.

And there are a lot of them. She's the youngest of three girls, and both of her sisters have significant others. The clan also travels with their cousin, a forty-something fellow who lives on the East Coast and has no qualms about flying cross-country for a little family time. Rounding out the in-law family circuit are, of course, my wife's parents.

For those of you counting at home, that makes nine of us.

The nine-some took the show on the road not long ago to surprise my mother-in-law for her sixtieth birthday. Our destination: The Pelican Inn, a straight-out-of-rural-England bed and breakfast in Muir Beach, a tiny town north of San Francisco. The place has seven rooms. We scooped up five of them.

Unlike the family weekends I was used to, the trip had no real itinerary; so long as all of us were there by 3:00 Saturday afternoon for the surprise, the rest of the visit was up for grabs. With this in mind, the weekend evolved organically. Once my mother-in-law recovered from the shock, we retired to a cozy living room called the Snug, where we lit a fire and swigged bottle after bottle of champagne.

The Snug was like something out of a Dickens novel. It had a huge inviting couch, overstuffed chairs, an upright piano, and leaded glass windows. One of my sisters-in-law pulled out her Sidekick and quizzed the group on family trivia. I didn't have the institutional knowledge to venture a guess, but it didn't matter since my wife was having so much fun.

Later a handful of us went for a walk on Muir Beach. With the sun about to set, we clambered up the bluff for a better view. From our perch, the steely Pacific spread out before us like a blanket tinged pink from the clouds above. In the distance, we spied the craggy Farallon Islands. Below us, sea lions frolicked in the surf.

Compared to the majesty of this view, the rest of the night was pretty low-key. We drank more champagne. We ate bangers and mash. We devoured a cake. Around 11:00, the night ended much the way it began -- snug in the Snug, playing Trivial Pursuit.

The next morning, after breakfast on the patio, there was more lounging, sipping, and laughing in the bar. Check-out came too soon. Under a gray and rainy sky, I could have whiled away the entire afternoon just laying low.

Today, looking back, all of the sitting and visiting on the birthday weekend struck me as unusual. My family relaxes by running all the time. The fact that my wife's family could hang and talk or stop and marvel at a sunset was refreshing, frustrating, boring, and exhilarating all at once.

The new approach wasn't better. It also wasn't worse. I missed the old ways, but I liked the new ways, too. More than anything, vacationing with my wife's family was just different -- a brief immersion into a strange and foreign culture. In the end, really, that's what traveling (and marriage) is all about.

How have your family trips changed over the years? What matters more to you -- the place or the people?

Matt Villano is a writer and editor based in Half Moon Bay, California. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Forbes, San Francisco Chronicle,and many other publications.  When he's not working, he likes running and watching whales.