This is really kind of a subset of “Family Lore.” Some of our best family memories and stories revolve around the many road trips we took during the “We have a few weeks of summer to kill, but aren’t yet at the income level to jet off to Europe” years (i.e., basically every year). Lesson to parents everywhere: Find the right audiobooks for your entire clan, and family road trips are a blast!

Weddings

(Full disclosure: Of the four events described in this section, only one involved an actual road trip. One was a cross-country flight, and the only travel the other two required was a BART trip to San Francisco. When you’re an alt-family, you get used to defining things pretty loosely.)

My kids have been to three weddings and a funeral. The funeral was for my grandmother, who had turned 100 in November 2006 and by January 2007 decided enough was enough. Either that, or when Gerald Ford passed away at the end of 2006, she figured she had nothing to live for. For reasons nobody understands, my grandmother worshiped Gerald Ford.

Traveling to the Northeast in January, the boys and I bought snow coats and wool hats, which aren’t exactly staples of a Bay Area wardrobe. Which meant that, of course, it was sixty degrees and sunny during our entire stay.

The trip is such a blur—between working three contracts and jet lag, I was really, really tired. My only clear memory is the kids sitting at a big round table at the post-cemetery lunch, singing “Windy” with their grandmother and cousins. Weird.

As for the weddings: It’s probably not a surprise that, of the three, one was between two women, and one between two men. The men are Uncles Cedric and Ray, who married in the short window when gay marriage was legal in California, before the passage of Proposition 8— October 2008, to be exact. The ceremony took place in San Francisco City Hall, under the rotunda, with about half a dozen guests present. The grooms wore guayabera shirts, and the boys were the ring-bearers. My only clear memory of that event was Daveon having his picture taken at the post-ceremony lunch holding a bread stick like a cigar.*

(*Apparently, my brain is much better at remembering things that happen after an event—and when there’s food involved—than at the event itself.)

The earlier wedding was between Max’s moms Marge and Cindy, during the even briefer window when the then-mayor of San Francisco declared that the city would issue marriage licenses to all couples, gay as well as straight. Never mind the fact that cities can’t make their own marriage laws.

The boys and I were among the (again, small handful of) friends and family invited to attend. I wasn’t sure how I was going to react, given that Marge and Cindy had already been together for over twenty years. Did the ceremony matter? Was it just a formality? But once again under the San Francisco City Hall rotunda, as the couple exchanged vows, I was overwhelmed by how moved I was at the ritual and the pledge.

My clearest memory of this event had nothing to do with food. When the boys and I arrived, Max met us at the door. He must have been about seventeen at the time. I was … um … older than that. He and I both happened to be wearing long-sleeved, button-down, French blue shirts.

After Marge and Cindy signed the marriage license in the clerk’s office, the group of us walked around looking for an available freelance celebrant. These were licensed ministers (most likely, licensed online) who roamed around the rotunda performing the ceremonies.

We walked up to a man who was maybe in his fifties, sixties, and he said to me right away, “Oh good! I was hoping I’d get you two!”

Me (pointing to Cindy and Marge): Thanks, but . . . the couple is over there.

Him (somewhat disappointed): Oh. Right.

Turns out: He assumed, seeing matching Max and me walking in with the kids, that we were the ones getting married. As we found out later, he was the first gay man in San Francisco to adopt, back in the 1970s. So marrying this (supposed) couple of adoptive gay parents was going to be a thrill for him—never mind the twenty-year age gap between the (supposed) betrothed.

For the record: The third wedding was for one of my cousins in Southern California. This is the road trip.* There was something ironic about the fact that I was skipping the East Bay’s first gay pride festival to attend this straight wedding. Sad to say, my cousin’s marriage—unlike Cedric and Ray’s, or Marge and Cindy’s—did not last. Because, you know, LGBTQ people are the downfall of family values.

(*Clearest memory? Staying with the boys at the Madonna Inn on our way home, in a room where literally everything was covered in red velvet. Highly recommended!)

California

Rituals, rituals, rituals. As the proud owner of an alternative family, it was all about the rituals. And then you can have fun with it by creating rituals within rituals. For the boys and me, while we were doing one of our favorite rituals—road trips—we upped the ante by slipping in another one: listening to Harry Potter audio CDs. Thank you, J. K. Rowling, for writing many, long, interesting stories that we all enjoyed. And thank you Jim Dale (the audio book narrator) for being so amazing handling hundreds of voices that sound exactly as you imagine the characters would speak.*

(* Except Hermione. Way off on the Hermione there, Jim.)

Here is the story of one magical road trip.

We started this one by heading to everyone’s favorite vacation destination, Stockton, California. Why Stockton, you ask? Because (a) it is the home of the Stockton Ports, the Oakland A’s single-A minor league team; (b) Daveon’s little league team at the time was the Ports; and (c) we are suckers for all things A’s-related.

The beauty of minor league ball is that ten dollars or so gets you a field-level ticket right behind the dugout—plus, if I remember correctly, a voucher for a hot dog or maybe nachos. From our front-section seats, my kids were—of course—asked if they wanted to stand with the team to sing the national anthem. Three guesses which one ran down onto the field, and which one stayed back.

During the game, the woman sitting behind us told the kids to cheer loudly every time Steve Kleen was up to bat. Turns out he was her boyfriend—even fiancé, maybe? Right on cue, every time Steve Kleen went to hit, he had Stockton’s loudest cheering section. Mark may not be so big on public performances, but when he’s anonymous he can definitely out-shout his brother, hands down.*

(*One of the very first things Mark said to me was, “I can scream hecka loud!” He proved this to be true on many occasions.)

After the game, Steve Kleen’s girlfriend/fiancée gave the boys one of those “Wait right here” movie lines, and went off. Fifteen minutes later, she came back loaded with an autographed game bat and balls and assorted other team swag. We’re pretty sure Steve Kleen never made it very far in the big leagues—we’ve never heard his name connected to any team, let alone the A’s. But if he becomes famous for any reason, we have some we-knew-him-when memorabilia that might be worth something.

Next stop: Chowchilla. This was my idea, to take the boys back to the town where they lived with foster mom Ms. Reed. She had recently passed away, and I thought they might benefit from a trip down memory lane. It turned more into a trip down no-memory lane, because the kids couldn’t remember where anything was. I was able to find the foster home, the only landmark I knew—luckily, the town is ridiculously small. But poking around for their schools or a park or a pool, or anything else they could recall—let’s just say, four- and six-year-olds don’t make the best navigators, especially several years after the fact. I think Daveon did remember where the McDonald’s was, so there’s that.

Our next stop was a few days of camping at Sequoia National Park (Crystal Caves! Dark!), and then on to Palm Springs to see Uncle Richard. Notable memory: Going to the water park, where Mark repeatedly went on the giant water slide attraction. The slides were so high, and the drop so vertical, that he was literally in the air a good ten feet before his body reconnected to the slide. My stomach drops just remembering the visual.

From there, we made our way to the bright lights of Whittier, California. Whittier is a sleepy (pop. 85,000), very Republican town about twelve miles southeast of Los Angeles. While it is probably most famous to the population at large as the town that gave us Richard Nixon, it is famous to our family as the home of our cousin Polly.

Polly—who is actually my dad’s first cousin, so a generation up from me—is about the best cousin you could have. She quilts and makes jam, sometimes from one of the many fruit trees in her yard. At around age fifty-five she married for the first time, to one of the leaders of the Marxist-Humanist movement (since passed—her husband, not the movement). Our house is festooned with Polly quilts and, true to her awesome nature, in the few days we spent in Whittier she taught the kids both how to quilt and how to make jam. They still have their nine-squares as evidence, although the plum jelly jars have long since been emptied.

After our time with Polly, we hit the Santa Monica pier, which was, you know, beach-pier-y, and then we made our way up the coast. I don’t know why we stopped in Pismo Beach—I had never been there, and it wasn’t anywhere near the top of my list. But the kids seemed interested in watching the surfers, so we stayed awhile.* On the walk back to the car, we passed a shop called—what else?—Quilting Cousins. Of course, a copy of the picture of the boys standing on either side of the sign went straight to Polly.

(*We later made several other trips to Pismo, during which my kids actually learned to surf. Another activity Dad was happy to watch from the sidelines. And I didn’t even laugh when they wiped out. Much.)

We had one more night ahead of us, which was supposed to be camping in Big Sur. I was, in all honesty, about ready to be done. The thought of pitching the tent again, which we had been able to ditch after Sequoia, and all the work involved in setup and then breakdown the following morning, wasn’t exactly appealing.

But I took a deep breath and put on my big boy pants. And camping was . . . indescribably amazing. We stayed at Limekiln State Park, at a site just a few yards from the ocean. We were hundreds of feet below a bridge section of Highway 1 that was supported on massive concrete legs—our tent was almost right between two of those legs. It sounds modern/urban-y, but the way they gracefully stretched up and formed an arch under the roadway was stunning. Especially at sunset, with the purple sun framed in the arch.

The kids—being themselves—immediately decided to become the co-mayors of Limekiln. Mark learned to play the card game Maus with some German tourists on the beach. For a kid who often seemed to have trouble speaking and understanding English—especially when the English involved the phrase “Stop messing with your brother”—the language barrier didn’t seem to get in the way at all. I bought him the game for Christmas, and he said it was more fun playing in German.

Daveon, meanwhile, befriended the brother and sister at the campsite next to us, who turned out to come to this particular park every year with their parents. Having our veteran neighbors as guides, we took a few walks inland, away from the shore, where rocky beach gives way almost immediately to redwoods, undergrowth, and streams. They took us to the actual lime kilns—a reminder that places used to be named for a logical reason, not a marketing concept—and to an inland waterfall with a rope swing, where the kids happily splashed around for a while. For a place I hadn’t wanted to go, it was very hard to leave.

The trip ended with a stop at Monterey Bay Aquarium, which should have been a highlight, but turned out to be anticlimactic. I think I had one of my rage-y mornings with Mark—as usual, I couldn’t tell you the cause—so I had one sulking kid, one bad temper (me), and a third party who happily got excited at everything from urchins to penguins to the snack bar. I guess when quilting cousins and lime kilns outshine boardwalk rides and sharks, you’re traveling right—or at least, traveling the Sadusky family way.

Victoria

Another excellent road trip was up to Victoria, British Columbia, to see Max during was his freshman year at the University of Victoria. My kids had the entire week of Thanksgiving off, so we decided to go up at that time to celebrate American Thanksgiving together. What’s life without a little turkey and stuffing?

The drive up—Harry Potter, book seven—was fine, except for the very long stretch between Eugene and Portland, Oregon, where everyone seemed determined to drive fifty on the freeway, regardless of the lack of traffic.*

(*Not to be confused with our second trip to Victoria, by train. On that one, midway through Oregon, apropos of nothing, Daveon asked, “Did you remember our passports?” “Of course I … wait. Did I? Oh shoot, nope.” Thank God for (a) Uncle Ray, who had a key to our house; (b) credit cards; (c) Seattle; and (d) FedEx. Nothing like an unplanned overnight by the Space Needle.)

After we eventually made our way out of Oregon, we got to drive up the Olympic peninsula where Forks, Washington—the setting of the Twilight books and movies—is located, although it would be a few years before my kids became Twilight-ites. We did get to hang out in the sleepy—and I mean, s-l-e-e-p-y—town of Port Angeles, waiting for the car ferry. We hit a bookstore, a mini grocery, and I believe a Dairy Queen. And then we were off, across the water, across the border.

I’m sure the word most often used to describe Victoria is “quaint.” And the word that most accurately describes Victoria is “quaint.” It’s one of those lovely tourist towns that seems to earn its loveliness honestly, or else does a really, really good job of putting on a show. The harbor area, where we stayed, is a mix of quaint streets with quaint shops selling quaint things, with just enough offbeat touristy traps to keep things interesting. I think we hit them all: the miniatures museum, containing small-scale models of, well, just about anything you can imagine that’s miniature-izable; the wax museum, appropriately creepy, which ended oddly enough in a veddy British candy shop where the kids—and Dad, for that matter—got their first taste of Turkish delight.* We also went to the undersea museum, which is basically a partially submerged boat with windows all around the bottom, so you could look directly into the harbor. We were supposed to be able to see the famous octopus. We didn’t see any octopus, famous or otherwise.

(*For those who get the reference, this was appropriately timed, as we had just seen the first Chronicles of Narnia movie, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.)

What we did see were bunnies . . . tons and tons of bunnies. Not in the harbor, fortunately, but on the University of Victoria campus itself. UVic was famous for its wild rabbits hopping all over the lawns, greens, and pretty much everywhere. They were, as Max put it, “a great thing to see when you walk out of an especially challenging final exam.” I’ve heard that the university has since shipped all of the bunnies away as a health hazard. Future students will never know what they were missing.

We didn’t actually get to see a ton of Max, given that that was his (bunny-aided) finals week. He did give us a tour of campus—conspicuously avoiding his dorm room, which raises all kinds of questions— and we did attempt American Thanksgiving with him and two or three of his best friends from school. The closest we could find was a steakhouse, no turkey. But it’s the thought that counts, right?

Being us, we did of course have our magic moment. Victoria is the provincial seat of British Columbia—the Canadian equivalent of a state capital—and our hotel was right next door to the parliament building. I was very curious about what a parliament building might look like, and was able to entice the kids to check it out with the story of how the middle gates open only to allow the Queen in when she made her “Hey, I’m gonna check out the provinces” visit. This is, of course, the very same Queen who might show up at our house and would be veddy pleased at how well the boys’ beds were made.

So in we went—through a side gate, of course—and were immediately stopped by a very stern-looking woman. 

Stern-looking Woman: Who let you in here?

Us: Um, no one. We just walked in the door.

SLW: I know why you’re here.

Us: Um, we’re visiting a friend at UVic. We’re from the U.S. We just wanted to see what a parliament building looked like.

The stern-looking woman stopped looking so stern.

Not SLW: Oh. Well, come back at 11:45. It’s the Grey Cup ceremony, and there will be children’s groups here. I thought you had heard about it and were trying to sneak in early. If anyone asks, just tell them you’re with Barb.

The Grey Cup, for anyone who doesn’t know—I didn’t—is the trophy given to the winning team in Canada’s national football league. Which is named, oddly enough, the Canadian Football League. That year, the BC Lions won the cup. This isn’t a big deal in Canada compared to the NHL’s Stanley Cup, and Canada’s CFL isn’t anywhere near as big a deal as the NFL in the States. But still, how many times do you get free front-row seats to a national sports award ceremony, even if it’s in another nation?

After a trip to the BC Museum—highly recommended, especially the very cool First Nations area—we were back at parliament just before noon. This time, we were stopped by a gruff, burly guard.

GBG: Can I help you?

Us: Um, we’re with Barb?

The guard was no longer gruff (though still burly).

Not GBG: Oh! Come with me.

The guard took us to (not-stern) Barb, who gave the kids t-shirts of whatever organization was sponsoring the children’s visit to the ceremony. Then we (well, they—I stood closer to the back) got their front-row seats with dozens of wide-eyed Victorian kids, as a few team players handed the cup around and gave short talks about the honor, their pride, their lessons for the kids, and other things you hear at awards ceremonies.

We made several later trips to see Max in Victoria, including the “oops, no passports” one by train. They each had their own memorable moments, but perhaps none was quite so special as our first encounter with the quaint little town on the harbor.

Next Chapter: Lessons (section)