Next week we are heading off to the Poconos for our last summer hoorah. I know, I myself can not even utter the word 'Poconos' without following it up with an slight internal belly laugh. My entire life, whenever I heard "The Poconos", all I could think of was the song that was sung in that super happy voice, something something, at the beautiful Mount Airy Lodge followed with a picture of the champagne glass bathtub for lovers, about 50 feet off the floor, right smack in the middle of the hotel room.

These images have stayed with me sadly, and are so very hard to shake. I can even remember the people in the commercials and what they looked like, as they seemed so in love and boy, I couldn't wait to be in love.

I scoured the internet for a good 20 minutes before I threw in the towel on trying to find a picture of that glass champagne bathtub. This heart shaped bathtub below, also conveniently located right smack dab in the middle of the room is not quite as cheesy as the mile high bathtub that you needed a ladder to climb into, but still cheesy enough to warrant a spot in this post.

So having grown up thinking The Poconos was the epitome of cheese, I am positively delirious about seeing it in the year 2008. I am extremely optimistic and thinking it just may not be too bad after all. And those Poconos people did have the good sense to erase every single solitary image of that glass champagne bathtub.

I told a friend of mine at work that we were headed to the Poconos for our summer vacation and she was practically speechless. She was like "oh, for some reason I don't really see you in the Poconos." Ya think?

So planning for this road trip and thinking about what to pack in the car to keep my little angels occupied, has stirred some memories, and I find myself reminiscing about when I was a kid and we would take summer road trips. I have been thinking about the kind of life my children have compared to the kind of life I had as a kid growing up, and let me tell you, they are miles apart.

Kids these days are so unbelievably spoiled by all of the modern day conveniences that are at their disposal. Take, for example, the car ride. My two older sisters and I rode in the back seat of a station wagon with the seat down so our sleeping bags could roll all the way out. Forget car seats or boosters with built in drink holders, our freaking back seat windows didn't even roll down and we had no air conditioning in the car AT ALL!! Our back windows had these side panels that you could unlatch and push out for air, as if that even helped us as we sat back there suffering through heat stroke, sweating our asses off, hair frizzing and dying of thirst. Would the car have cost that much more to have just added the back seat window option?

My kids ride in a luxury SUV with their own climate controlled air conditioning in the back seat, pimped out with DVD players for their entertainment, speakers for the radio, and every other bell and whistle you can think of, and I think I live fairly simply. The way life is today, it is hard not to have these modern conveniences without appearing to be completely old and farty. Not to mention how lame the kids will think you are....

I came across an article in our local New York City Parent newspaper that had me laughing out loud! It was called 'Where have all the station wagons gone?' by Newbie Dad, Brian Kantz. Every single word in that article could have come from my own mouth about my childhood experiences with car traveling family road trips. He talks about his parents piling him and his three brothers into the old family station wagon for a summer trip. He said they would just spread a couple of sleeping bags in the way back, just as we did, and when the car would stop at a red light, the sleeping bag and anyone on it would slide forward. Then upon acceleration, they would slide quickly back. OH MY GOODNESS, this part made me laugh so hard, Drew was like, what is going on over there?

Anyone that has experienced that constant sliding around in the back of a station wagon would get a laugh out of this article (if you would like to read it, http://www.briankantz.com/june08.htm). Then he goes on to talk about how they stored the luggage on the top of the car all wrapped up in bungee cords underneath a tarp, but definitely not in these ultra fancy aerodynamic Thule car racks that everyone has now.

He continues to describe how everyone used their cars until they absolutely fell apart. He describes a hole in the floor of the backseat of his family's station wagon. An honest-to-goodness rusted out hole and how he has heard about other people that also had this hole...yeah, Bri, uh, we also had a hole only it didn't belong to our fire engine red station wagon. This particular hole belong to the 1960 White Dodge Dart that my Mother received as a gift from her Dad when she was a young adult. That's right, a hole so big that I used to pretend that I could go down into it like we had a lower level in the car. I remember actually pretending to go 'down below' when other people would drive close enough to us to see me.

So, my family would take these trips to Canada and we would all lay down in the back almost the whole way until we couldn't even conceive of laying down for another minute. Fights over whose feet were touching whose, and who was sliding into someone else's turf, filled the car. My Mother would test me and my sisters about trivia that we had learned during our trip. She was so serious about it that she actually wrote every question down, of which there were many, and fired them off to us one after the other. I being the youngest, basically never got a chance to answer any of them, much less correctly.

We didn't ride in the pimped out style that my kids are accustomed to now, but we had the best times. Things were easier, life was less complicated and being a kid was so fun and carefree. I can only hope that my girls feel the same way about their own childhood's that are filled with every gadget known to man, as I do about mine.

So yes, we are going to the Poconos and not the Hamptons and we are going to love it even if it kills us.