Fun family road trip

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An old story in my family has it that a foremother drove a covered wagon from Ontario to North Dakota, circa 1850, stopping only briefly somewhere between Minneapolis and Billings to give birth to her ninth child.

Well, it could be true; certainly her progeny has the same wanderlust in our veins. Before we had kids, my partner Victor and I defined vacation as "road trip": nothing involving fewer than 5,000 clicks on the odometer qualified as a true getaway. Children, of course, have a way of resetting your benchmarks, so as our own (eventually) three arrived we filed the tattered CAA road maps and reckoned that an outing to the mall with a teenager, toddler and newborn was adventure enough.

Still, when we embarked on our first real driving trip - from Toronto to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island - with our two daughters (then aged eight months and almost three), my 15-year-old stepson and my parents, it was with nothing but enthusiasm. My stepson, Tom, had made the trip to Cape Breton Island - Victor's birthplace - every summer since he was a toddler and could, I figured, find his way there unaided, like the trio of animals in The Incredible Journey. My parents were veteran road warriors - and besides, as my kids' favourite babysitters, they'd be a net gain. And my little babies were, I considered, as portable and accommodating as Eddie Bauer duffel bags.

I was surprised, therefore, when innocent bystanders suggested that we were taking not a holiday but leave of our senses. As my brother-in-law pointed out, "Chevy Chase makes movies about this kind of vacation." You may be expecting me to admit here that the whole project devolved into a sort of horror on wheels. (And, indeed, there was one night, as we searched fruitlessly for a hotel somewhere in rural Quebec during a thunderstorm, that did seem like the opening of a Wes Craven film.) But it wasn't. A horror, I mean. How else could I have acquired memories like the one of my three-year-old paddling in the Atlantic with her grandfather, or my husband and his son sitting under the eaves of an isolated motel in Maine, with the ancient North Woods a dozen feet away and a Stephen King rain sheeting from the roof?

Since then we've hit the road at least once a year and been rewarded with a reaffirmation of our philosophy of family travel: vacations should be true getaways for every member of the family. And, with some give-and-take, some ingenuity and some - OK, a lot - of tongue-biting, everybody on board can have the holiday of his or her dreams.