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What I Did on my Summer Vacation

© Cynthia Webber (Jausten)

When I was a child, returning to school after the summer meant writing an essay about what I did during my vacation. I doubt if my teachers assigned this essay in order to see if my spelling or grammar had deteriorated during my three months of freedom from school. In fact, I'm sure that they assigned this writing because they wanted to prolong the next nine months of teaching a new group of students, and wanted to keep us busy and quiet during the first week of school. Or maybe they just wanted to pry into my family life and see if my parents were continuing my education during the long, lazy days of summer.

Dutifully, I'd write about our two weeks of camping each summer, and I suppose that they felt that I was being educated since we went camping in the mountains, desert, or near the ocean. I guess they felt that I was learning geography, history, and even about nature as my parents took me to many areas of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah during my childhood. Sure, I knew some of the constellations as my dad pointed them out to me at night around a campfire, plus I could identify different flowers, trees, mountains, and bodies of water. We must have visited every mission throughout California, and went on hikes through different areas during our summer vacation. Sliding down the sand dunes in the desert, building sand castles at the beach, climbing trees, or visiting different tourist attractions were a part of my growing years, yet what I wrote about in my yearly essays wasn't about any learning that I'd done.

I was too young to write about how I felt when I saw the Grand Canyon or Carlsbad Caverns for the first time, so I just wrote that we visited it. No doubt, my teachers were pleased that my parents were providing me with interesting experiences. As far as learning any geography, I was usually stretched out in the back of the station wagon on my sleeping bag either reading, playing with my dolls, fighting with my older brother, or playing card games with him after our parents were at their wit's end with us during the long drives to our destination. Looking out the window at the scenery or listening to my dad tell us where we were didn't interest me as much as searching for letters of the alphabet on car license plates in order to beat my brother at our mindless car game.

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