What are people thinking when they say they are going “off the grid”?  Although lack of connectivity is being seen as the new luxury, the roots of the desire are related to what I believe is our innate inner desire to see inner consciousness and clarity.  Said another way, to get out of our robotic daily routines and challenge our senses in off-the-beaten-path adventures and experiences– the Jack Kerouac in each of us.

Growing up, my parents’ answer to this quest was simple: camping. On those long, cross country trips– most of which were driving, we were disconnected to everything, only having each other, and the locations, for entertainment (/enlightenment?). And, yes, that driving did involve the iconic, classic seventies station wagon and pop-up camper.

Somehow, our popup never looked so stylized as the staged image above. Where were the copious amounts of dirty laundry, cans of Off!, comic books strewn all over, and open boxes of cereal (my brothers and I each had to have own flavor)?  I *owned* Boo-Berry.

Coupled with the mess of three boys,  my parents had to deal with all of the stories that came from those trips: the time my brothers took me on a boat ride in Maine and left me on a deserted rock island (I was the one who allowed it– I wanted to chill on my own), the time my Pop forgot he had a shotgun in the trailer when were stopped by the Canadian border patrol, and the time I was “chased” by a Grizzly bear in Jasper National Park.   It’s enough to ask if Art does imitate Life:  How did they get the idea for Bobby and Cindy to get lost in the Grand Canyon?  Was Clark’s station wagon really that ugly?

All of that drama to ostensibly get off-the-grid, and achieve a higher order of clarity.  How could parents do that with all the stress of constantly looking for their kids, and all without today’s luxuries of mobile phones and GPS?  In the 70s, our version of GPS was the AAA Triptik.

There was such an element of adventure to go the AAA office with Mom and see (and hear) the agent and his/her squeaky highlighter map out our travel plan across flip page after flip page– giving the special “go this route for scenery, that route for expediency”.  We always opted for the former, which sometimes put us either in places straight out of the Deliverance, and other times in utterly amazing locales we otherwise would have never discovered (an example of that for my brothers would have been any chance to go to the Reptile Gardens).

Speaking of AAA, it’s interesting that they are working on staying relevant, having released a new study revealing that more than one-third of Americans will take a family vacation this year.

And who’s planning those vacations?  Is it Mom or Dad? A “Great Wolf Lodge” study seemed to reveal that Dad is now taking the reigns from Mom– which brought a rather funny (yet typical) argument between Mom and Dad blogs about– essentially- who is working harder. I think the answer is that Great Wolf Lodge is the one working hard– on driving up their attendance, IMHO.

Maybe the Great Wolf Lodge has a point, though. Just look at the difference in how the toy companies are changing the roles in the family:

Yep, Lego’s now has a “hip” stay-at home Dad (and notably, a cool, handi-capable teen).  But, is it even fair to say that the Mom or the Dad, or the stay-at-home-parent is the one who is doing all the “off the grid” planning?  In our family, one of us is the creative/idea generator, while the other one tends to be the structured planner.  And we’ve learned to morph and adapt at even those roles, as the situation requires.  We are challenging ourselves to be more conscious, even in the planning aspects of those off-the-grid experiences which will lead us to enlightenment (?).

In the next blog, we’re going to take a deeper dive into what actually happens once we get to those destinations that come from the vacations– is it about the destination, or the process of getting there?  Isn’t that always the question?