When In Rome

This blogpost appeared as my July column "The Empty Nest" in the Frederick News Post.

Summer is here and that means it’s vacation time! While we haven’t had a family vacation for a while, there were many that taught this family about travel. One trip to California taught my son that if you travel to a far off place, you must experience what your destination has to offer you.

We spend a lot of time at baseball parks. It’s a passion of my son. Many years ago, the Frederick Keys had a Blockbuster Video contest during each game. Timmy entered the contest at every game we attended, but he never won. In early September that year, we received a telephone call and were told that Timmy had won the Blockbuster grand prize-a trip to California! The woman on the phone quickly informed us that the trip included hotel accommodations and a few other perks, but that airfare to California was not included. With an airline employee in the family, this was not a concern for us. We would use my husband’s employee flight benefits.

So we began planning our mini vacation to California. On the top of my son’s list of things to do was to ride the new Jurassic Park ride that had just opened up at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. He had seen commercials on TV and was elated to have the opportunity to finally go there. It was all he talked about for the weeks leading up to the trip.

When we arrived in California, Timmy was ready to head directly to the amusement park. It was all that we could do to convince him to wait until the next day. Early that morning, he woke ready to go. At the park when the gates opened, we headed directly to the Jurassic Park area for the ride he so wanted to experience.

His pace slowed as we neared the large dinosaurs. The jungle sounds were all around us and things began to feel a little eerie. You could almost sense an imminent dinosaur attack. Then my son stopped dead in his tracks. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” he said. He started to list the dangers of amusement park rides. Perhaps it would be best for our safety if we skipped the ride and just strolled around the park.

I sat my son down on a nearby bench and told him about how he had waited for months to ride, how it was the only thing he could talk about, and how we had traveled so far to experience this one particular ride. And then I became the evil mother. I forced my son to get back in the line and ride that ride. I held his hand the entire time and tried to convince him that it would be all right.

We rode the ride, we went to Rome and did like the Romans. I’m not sure he forgave me, but I think somewhere deep inside he was glad we did.