I'm here. Mostly.

I know the vacation is over. Two pieces of indisputable evidence:
1. I am in my own bed and room.
2. There is a Mt. Everest of laundry to do.

The harder question: was the vacation a success? Shall we define success?

Everyone made it home. Despite overwhelming temptation, I managed not to abandon my children at a rest stop in Florida. I resisted the urge to duct tape their snarky, argumentative, nasty little selves up to the luggage rack.

On the flip side, it will be a new decade before the kids ever see the Wii again. Dessert will be a distant memory. Computer? Off limits until they're old enough to drive. Punishment or vengeance? A little of both, I admit. Vacations with kids just aren't really vacations. And I was mad, Mad MAD that they were ruining mine.

The other thing, the thing I just couldn't reconcile, is the memory I have of my childhood vacations. My sister and I, and sometimes my grandparents, rode in the station wagon for HOURS.
This morning, I mapquested some of the trips we took:
Home to Zion Canyon (new roads have been built, by the way) 6:49
Home to Yellowstone National Park 15:30
Home to Lake Tahoe 7:51
Home to Crater Lake 12:22

I know, can you BELIEVE my parents took us all those places, and more? What were they thinking? The kicker is, that once we got to those places, we hiked, explored, picnicked, read every historic plaque, stopped at every informational booth, and ate anywhere. There was NO MacDonald's on our trip. Potty stops came when the car needed gas. DVD's were futuristic sci-fi. Once I was about 11 or 12, I had my own camera and a Walkman, which helped pass the time. I remember being hot and complaining on a hike from the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But EVERYONE complains while hiking from the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
I remember taking a picture next to a sign that said "Caution: do not proceed unless you have adequate supplies of food and water" AND THEN PROCEEDING.
In Yellowstone, my dad took us fishing, and I got stuck up to my ankles in mud and a fishing hook entangled in my hair and attacked by ferocious vampire mosquitoes. NO COMPLAINING ALLOWED.
In New Mexico (Arizona?), my parents found this crazy expensive, crazy fancy five star restaurant called the Tack Room. I still remember it. We were told to behave or die, and I remember trying so hard to be grown up and polite. Maybe we weren't, it's hard to visualize what we looked like from an adult perspective, but I will say it wasn't because we weren't trying.
What I don't remember is trying to gouge out my sister's eyes in the back seat. Or plopping down on the sidewalk and refusing to take another step. Or screaming at the top of my lungs in the car. Or constantly whining about being bored. Or being rude and disrespectful to my parents. Or refusing to sleep in the hotel room. Or visibly crying that the restaurant had nothing on the menu that any human could eat.
I mean, maybe I'm wrong and my memory is as full of self-righteousness now as it was when I was a kid. Maybe I was a constant brat who fought non-stop with my sister, threatening to go to the death (or at least to the pain.) Maybe my parents sat up there in the front seats of the car contemplating a sudden swerve into oncoming traffic to end the misery of the vacation. Maybe every summer, my parents shook their heads, and said "maybe this year, they'll behave." And every year they planned the trip with optimism and enthusiasm only to have their best intentions squelched by uncooperative children. Every year.
Maybe that's how it was. Or not.
But that is how it is for me. Every spring, I suggest to M that the kids are a year older, and that we can't put our travel goals on hold for the next 14 years of our lives, and that this year will be different. And we should plan a great vacation. And then every summer on that hard-won vacation, I not only have to referee the death match between the kids, but have to listen to M shouting over the din, "I TOLD YOU SO!"
But, now we're home. The kids are happy to retreat to their own rooms, their Legos, their books. They are happy-ish to have 'regular' food and their pool, and their routine, and their lives. They are fighting, of course, but I have the recourse to send them to their rooms to achieve a temporary cease fire. I could, theoretically, retreat to my own office and post to my own blog in peace and quiet, except that the field of battle has moved down to the space immediately behind my right ear. They have armed themselves with Chinese checkers cannonballs and playing card missiles. The war rages on. It is now a civil war on domestic territory. There will be no casualties in a quiet restaurant or a neighboring hotel room. I am hostage.
There's no place like home.