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Family Vacation is a Lie

… or how I traveled with kids on summer break, and all I got was this grape snow cone. This week, the Dads talk about the season of family vacations. While these trips are a tremendous amount of work, all the research and our lasting memories suggest that, although these journeys aren’t exactly vacations, the family trip is incredibly valuable to the family unit. 

This episode explores some of the research — both academic and anecdotal — that supports our theory that these trips are great for families (if only in the long term), as well as some of the great country songs that can help us through the grind of the summer family vacation or family trip.

Show Notes

01:08: How do we define the family trip vs. a vacation? Well, Google and the all-powerful AI summary help us out by delivering a clear and concise explanation. 

02:08: Benefits of a Family Trip: While it’s exhausting, research seems to back the idea of taking a family trip. It keeps our family talking, helps our kids learn and enhances the bond between partners, no matter what was said when the directions were not followed exactly. 

03:58: The Brutality of Traveling With Children: As a Stay-at-Home-Dad and “Default Parent,” Dave feels that family trips are often like business trips. So it’s just parenting on the road as you deal with the “brutality of traveling with children.”

06:28: Content Warning: The first mention of vomit. 

08:33: Content Warning: The second mention of vomit.

9:39: Content Warning: The third mention of vomit.

11:35: Family Team-Building on the Family Trip: The idea of working together as a family during these trips helps the family grow together — working as a team makes you a better family.  

12:46: Dave’s Notorious Family Trip to Sequoia National Park and the Fisher Price Toy Lantern.

14:50: What is the best place to stay during a family trip? The rental house vs the hotel seems to be the debate. While the space and privacy seem to win out, the breakfast buffet is a huge plus.

20:40: Do Family Trips Need to Be Educational? Research suggests that educational trips make kids smarter, but do trips need to be explicitly educational for kids to extract value from the trip? The Dads touch on how just changing it up a bit, doing things you want to do and working through the difficulties on the road provides the real educational value — and how Dad Stories (read: lies about things on the side of the road) are critical. 

27:32: Content Warning: The fourth mention of vomit. 

29:50: Conquering the Family Trip: The Dads discuss packing, planning spreadsheets, and other key tactics. 

32:19: Content Warning: The fifth mention of vomit, and this one is intense. 

33:14: Giving our Kids a 90s Summer: Is this possible? Should it be? 

40:27: The Songs of the Summer: The Dads debate the greatest country music for the summer. As well as a few songs for cleaning up vomit. 

51:17: Change My Mind: Donnie attempts to change Dave’s mind about using profanity in front of the kids. It’s a great f**ing conversation. 

Thank you for listening. The best way to support us is to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or whatever podcast platform you use. If you want to see new episodes and more content delivered straight to your email inbox, please subscribe to our newsletter: countrymusicdads.substack.com. You can find everything we do on our website: countrymusicdads.com. And we’d love to hear what you think, so send us comments, suggestions, friendly banter on Instagram @countrymusicdads, or via email countrymusicdads@gmail.com.

Mentioned in the Show

References:

Transcipt

This is Country Music Dads, the parenting podcast with a twang.

We’re driving a highly subjective, comically contrarian, often irreverent conversation about fatherhood and country music for people who have a passion for both.

My name’s Dave, and I’m a country music dad.

My name’s Donnie, and I’m also a country music dad.

This week, we talk about the season of road trips, seaside getaways, cabins in the woods, and epic tantrums that often accompany these time-honored traditions.

That’s right, folks, school’s out, camps are starting, the week on that calendar marked in red is coming up, the family vacation.

Documented with beautiful photos, and often remembered fondly in the dead of winter or in decades to come, often through rose-colored glasses.

But today, with so many distractions, expectations, and scheduled activities, the easy family getaway seems to be anything but.

A simple search of the web offers thousands of articles and posts about the fallacy of the family vacation.

And that’s because it’s not a family vacation.

It’s a family trip.

Because Google does it for us, AI analyzed all the literature.

And it says that vacation emphasizes relaxation and rest, while a family trip focuses on spending quality time together and creating shared experiences, even if it involves more work and less leisure.

First-hand human experience says this all checks out.

The time-honored joke of needing a vacation from your vacation rings true in our world.

And we don’t hear that as often from our single or childless peers upon returning home or back to work.

Yet there isn’t a parent among us who hasn’t thought about the beauty of having a little time off to yourself after that quote-unquote time off with the family.

But it’s still good to get away from the day-to-day to spend some quality time with the family, and it’s also backed by research.

The US.

Department of Education states that children who travel are smarter and better equipped to learn in school.

University of Massachusetts researchers found that kids are better communicators, families are happier, and despite what might have been said after someone told you to take that turn near Des Moines, divorce is less likely if families take trips together.

And still, it’s a lot.

So today, we’ll get into that conversation, explore some of this research, both academic and anecdotal, and which great country songs can help us get through the grind, family, vacation, better known as a family trip.

So, Dave, in your opinion, what differentiates a family vacation from a family trip?

We mentioned it a little bit in the intro.

A vacation evokes relaxation and ease.

When you take your family with you, in particular, when you take your kids with you, relaxation and ease is not the first thing that comes to mind.

One of the articles that we’ll link in the show notes on the Huff Post, this great writer, M.

Blazend, I hope I’m pronouncing her name correctly, but she’s very funny.

She describes a trip as it’s just a journey to a place.

That’s it.

It’s just you have to get from point A home to point B, the site for all the timeless family memories you’re going to make.

Indeed.

That journey can often be a little arduous depending on the age of your kids, how many of them you have, and how difficult they are as people already.

I’ve always felt like, especially as a stay-at-home dad, the default parent, some people say that when we go on vacation as a family, it just means that I am being a parent somewhere else.

I’ve heard that from some of the other at-home dads that I know, that it’s almost like a business trip for the default parent.

You’re just taking your show on the road, your normal mundane argumentative existence, and kind of adding some more stressors.

You’re all packed in a small little hotel room together, and everyone has to sleep in the same room for a week.

At the same time.

Yeah.

I saw a great reel on Instagram, beautiful picture of kids swimming in the ocean, and it says, sure, vacations are expensive, but how can you put a price tag on your children being ungrateful in another city?

There’s some deep humor in all of this.

It is parenting in a different location, and the trip is for them in some ways, right?

Them being the kids, it’s about that opportunity going into what the research is saying.

It is good for the kids, and they get to learn something, they get to do something different, helps them communicate and all that stuff.

But that’s a lot of work.

And I think you can get wrapped up in the, this must be good, this must be enjoyable, we shall have fun, I shall schedule fun and we will have it mentality that I think we can easily get into.

Forced family bonding is a term I have heard.

We will have fun at 4.30 and it will be fun.

And then we will go on and read books at 4.45.

Quiet time begins at this point.

Yeah, I mean, it can really be quite difficult to do.

But there is a little bit of this that gets into changing the routine, which then enhances the experience.

There’s a good sub-stack, Nuclear Meltdown, by Jim Dareriple.

Jim Delriple, I think.

Okay, so Jim Delriple.

Sorry, Jim.

But he wrote on, for the Institute of Family Studies, about the brutality of traveling with kids.

And that was such a good line, man.

That is worth the repeating.

The brutality of traveling with kids.

Yeah.

Yes.

So, I mean, I think that that sums it up pretty well.

I mean, the last family trip I went on, I cupped much more vomit in my hands than my hands could hold for a good 30 minutes at the end of the flight.

This was a brutally early flight, adding to the brutality of traveling with my children.

And so towards the end of it, I kind of nodded off because everyone else had already nodded off.

And my youngest goes, Daddy, I don’t feel so well.

I’m a little hot.

And I said, OK.

I woke up.

I take off his sweatshirt.

I give him a sip of water.

He goes, Oh, I feel so much better.

I go, OK.

And then, you know, everybody kind of nods off again.

And then I hear, and I was like, Oh, no.

And it was it was so much vomit.

It was just so much.

And everybody in the plane goes, Oh, rough.

And the guy next to me goes, Oh, bad.

And I am a very sympathetic vomiter.

You know, I can do it all.

I can deal with my kids vomit.

I can deal with my kids vomit.

I have no problem with that.

99% of the time.

But it’s that 1% that you need to worry about.

And, you know, for the most part, that’s at home, you know, no big deal.

But when you’re on a plane and you’re in the middle seat and this poor guy got on last and saw, Oh, great.

There’s an empty aisle seat.

I’ll sit next to these guys.

I don’t think he had that in the cards.

And I held it together.

I was a little pale and perhaps a little sweaty and clammy myself by the end of it.

But that was pretty gross and way brutal.

But you know, the parenting community came in big on that flight.

We no longer travel with diapers.

But when we did, we also traveled with the full Costco sized wipes.

Someone was like here and handed me a full thing of Costco wipes, which was clutch.

I cleaned myself up, cleaned the chair up, got the kid as clean as I could do it.

My wife came in and took care of the secondary cleaning because I definitely would not have made it through that.

We threw out all his clothes and started over.

So it’s just the way that goes.

But everybody has that story.

My mom reminded me that I threw up hot dog chunks into her woven culottes when in the early 80s on some flight from New York to Boston when we were visiting family.

Everybody has that story.

So it is highly brutal.

And we mean every kind of story.

There’s always some sort of failure.

Family vacation, you would think, or the word vacation should evoke relaxation and ease.

But a family vacation evokes vomit, actually.

All the stories that I could think of also from so far, are my young family traveling.

And the best stories from when I was growing up, our vacations, are all the barf stories.

Isn’t that, that’s crazy.

You know, barf brings people together.

I suppose, yeah.

I guess it’s just universally brutal traveling with kids.

And barf is a part of that.

Yeah.

Because it’s almost inevitable.

It’s the car sickness, it’s getting sick on a plane, it’s poorly timed illness.

We took a camping trip with the family to June Lake this one summer.

I think in one of these pieces, they mentioned camping as a particularly arduous endeavor.

And so I went in with eyes open though, because I know that taking these trips is for my kids and the family unit as a whole.

It’s not for me.

This is not for my enjoyment.

I need to find and carve out time to do stuff for myself that is separate from the family, because I think I’ve had enough of these experiences wiping up, disassembling the car seat to find all the vomit and all the crevices.

I realized that going in, like, this is about them.

I’m going to hunker down and do the work so that they can have this memory.

And of course, my kid barfed in the tent that we were all sharing in the middle of the night.

So we’re in the dark.

I’m wiping it up.

I think we were at the campsite for exactly 36 hours.

Oh, that’s so awesome.

And so I had just unpacked everything, set up the site.

I had a good Country Music playlist going on the portable speaker.

The site next to us, they were jealous of the playlist.

It was so good.

That was the peak.

It was like, as soon as I cracked the first beer after the tent was set up, it was all downhill from there.

There was wind, tree branches were falling, and of course, there was barf.

Of course there was barf.

We drove all the way home before it hit me.

Oh, that’s solid.

Whatever it was.

But that right there is the perfect segue into the other aspect of what Jim was writing about in that article, is that it gives you this chance to work together.

That goes and is supported by all that other research, and this is the lived experience part of it, is that there was a time when families worked together, and there was cohesion because you had to do the stuff on the farm or you had to do the stuff in the household to eat, to be safe, to keep it warm.

It’s no longer an issue because of advancements and kind of the individuality of American life.

You don’t have that as much anymore, but when you’re traveling, you really need to be able to do that.

And because you have to clean up the barf and you have to wipe up the tent or because you have to carry the bags or because you have to make a thousand choices at a time, you get that chance to work as a team and that team mentality is good.

But it changes the paradigm.

It pushes us into an experience that’s different.

I think that’s where you really get to learn a little more about each other that leads to people being smarter, that leads to better communication skills, that makes the hard work worthwhile beyond kind of those lasting memories and vomit fatigue, I guess.

Vomit fatigue is what I’m getting at.

The family trip that my family, when I was growing up, my nuclear family talks about the most.

This one incident happened before the BARF happened, because BARF happened later in the trip.

There’s like so much that went wrong with this trip, and that’s why it’s notorious, and that’s why we always talk about it.

It’s like the most remembered and the most talked about family trip.

It was to Sequoia National Park.

I remember my brother, he’s the youngest, my youngest sibling, he insisted on bringing this bulky Fisher Price battery-powered lantern with us.

I remember there was a fight because we didn’t have room for it, and why are you bringing this thing?

We don’t need it.

We were renting a cabin.

We don’t need this lantern, but he was hell-bent on taking this lantern with us.

And we got to our cabin and unpacked everything, and the power went out.

And the only light we had was the Fisher Price Toy Lantern.

And you’re talking about how these experiences helped to gird the family unit and make the family operate more like a team.

I feel like that event helped my brother, who’s the baby brother, forever the baby brother, feel like he was contributing something to the trip.

And we still talk about that to this day.

If that was me, or my sister, who is the youngest, it wouldn’t be so much that we contributed.

It was that we were right, and everyone else was wrong.

But I mean, you know, in every family, there’s a different dynamic.

So I think that’s important to remember, but that’s definitely how that would have gone.

That’s probably me, the oldest sibling, interpreting his feelings for him.

Oh, I see.

He probably was like, that’s right.

I’m going to spike the football.

Yeah.

But hopefully not the Fisher Price lamp because we won’t be able to see.

Yeah, we need that.

We need that thing.

Yeah.

So I’m sensing a theme in your vacations or family trips, rather, that you go places where stuff can go very wrong, like out in the woods.

So when you’re traveling with your family, do you stay with family?

Do you go on an Airbnb?

Do you stay in a hotel?

Where do you draw that line?

What is the right choice for you?

You’re right to interpret that when we go on family vacations, we’re gluttons for punishment.

We go, we kind of sign up for a little bit too much.

We’re not picking comfort.

It’s like, you know what?

We like camping.

We’re going to force this to happen and deal with the consequences.

And we deal with the consequences.

I deal with it emotionally.

And yeah, usually it’s an Airbnb because of the space.

We’re a family of five.

It’s a little more comfortable.

It gives the parents at least the illusion of relaxation that once the kids are asleep, because my kids are young, seven and under, they’re in a separate space and we have our own space and an Airbnb, a condo or a house or something.

The hotel room can be a little bit claustrophobic.

And then once it’s lights out for the young kids, then you’re just kind of hiding in the dark or in the bathroom until it’s time for you to go to sleep.

You don’t get that same opportunity for adult time to read your book and drink your wine or do whatever.

So I’d say that’s usually how we do it.

We’ve gone back and forth.

I mean, thinking about it, we stay with family sometimes, but we haven’t done it so much in the recent past, in large part because our kids are getting bigger and we take up much more space.

And so that doesn’t work as well.

But we live close to my parents, and so we see them all the time, and we go over to their house and leave our children and run fast.

But when we go to Oklahoma, it just doesn’t work.

We’re four people who are very loud and take up a lot of space, both physically and emotionally.

So it doesn’t really work out when we’re doing that, visiting the other side of the family.

When we’re in Oklahoma, we definitely stay in an Airbnb just to get the space to spread out.

We are not being sponsored by Airbnb, but we would welcome that opportunity just putting that out there.

But for me, really, like the absolute win is a suite hotel where you can close a door and put the kids in the pullout couch.

This is yet to work.

We’re not quite there yet, but I can see that.

I’ve heard that mentioned before, suite in a hotel, that’s the dream right there.

And I’m not talking like high-end suite.

I’m talking like an embassy suite, lovely hotel, no big deal.

Oh, I love embassy suites.

I think every dad loves embassy suites.

I love an embassy suite, but the real reason I love the embassy suite is the breakfast in the morning.

I am a sucker for a bad buffet breakfast.

And the kids are like, can I have another thing of Froot Loops?

They’re like, go to town, it’s Froot Loops.

It’s like, can I put Froot Loops on my Texas-shaped waffle?

Go to town with whipped cream.

And then you’re like the king of the day for at least a couple of minutes.

And that’s really good because everybody loves a Texas-shaped waffle.

The kids are happy.

I’m happy.

There’s free coffee, which is probably important because odds are I slept in the pullout couch with one of the children.

They have Texas-shaped waffle irons in Texas?

They have everything Texas-shaped in Texas.

It’s the greatest.

I got to go.

You know, that sounds awesome.

We are going to Texas this summer for our family trip.

We’re visiting the summer camp where Abby and I met.

They’re having their 50th reunion, and we worked the 30th reunion when we were on staff, and when we met, and we were younger, and I had hair not on my face, and it wasn’t gray.

It was a good time.

It was a long time ago, but I’m excited to do it.

We went back 10 years ago with pretty much a newborn, and now we have two camp-aged heathens coming with us.

So one of the nights, we’re really excited to be staying at a hotel that has breakfast in the morning.

Like, honestly, that’s…

I’m really excited about that.

We’re gonna do all sorts of other cool stuff, but that’s on my list of things I’m excited about.

The kids are always excited for the hotel breakfast, and somehow, when I’m on a trip with the family, I’m also inordinately excited for the hotel breakfast.

That’s great.

I go to sleep eagerly looking forward to a hard-boiled egg and some of the potatoes.

I know exactly what you’re saying.

The tray of potatoes.

Yeah, they’re great.

Whatever the potato is, it’s good.

Doesn’t matter what’s down there, actually.

I look forward to it.

It’s a great surprise.

The only thing I need is nitro-level coffee, though.

I need it to take paint off walls.

You gotta hit it at the right time, because if you get it too fresh, it hasn’t sat long enough to concentrate.

It’s got to steep.

Yeah, it has to steep and boil down a little bit.

So you drink it, you’re like, this is going to cause me pain and suffering.

However, I’m going to be OK for the road trip.

That’s really what you need in a hotel breakfast.

And I will say the Airbnb part of that kind of stinks because there’s no other option but getting up and making breakfast.

That part’s less fun.

Big win for the default parent or whoever makes the breakfasts, usually, too.

Yeah, it’s just one less thing to worry about.

I think that’s really what makes family trips so complicated, is that you’re completely out of your routine.

And while some people really love that, that doesn’t work for my kids.

Both of my kids love to know what’s coming next.

They want to know everything.

And that, to me, is pretty difficult when you have to do a little bit of flying by the seat of your pants.

Being able to, like, check one thing off that list and it includes waffles, usually that’s a win.

The research suggests that educational trips lead to kids being smarter.

So, Donnie, do you feel like you need to make your trips educational for them to extract the most value for your kids?

I have a lot to say about pretty much anything on the side of the road.

Some of it’s true.

Most of it I make up on the spot, as is my right as a father on a road trip.

You’re a creator.

You’re a content creator even on the road.

I am a content creator.

See, the original content creators were dads in cars.

I mean, let’s just be real.

Great story on the side.

My grandfather-in-law, who I never met, would drive with his daughters in the back seats, passing fields in Iowa and say, look over there, girls, that’s a sod farm.

I take that mantle of intergenerational responsibility of telling that type of story very personally.

I think that’s something we need to continue.

My dad told another story like that to my mom once, but that may or may not have been under the influence of something else that may or may not have been sod.

But I do think that it’s important to expose your kids to stuff that is different.

And that really does help them take in things differently, understand stuff differently.

Every kid, every person learns differently and putting yourself in a situation that isn’t a school room, classroom, on the playground, etc.

Really does do your brain development well.

Because you remember stuff that’s different.

You don’t always remember the things that are mundane and one over another and other.

The fact of the matter is you remember the Fisher Price Lantern because it was so different and so interesting and so just ridiculous.

That’s the type of thing that sticks with you.

It helps you tell stories.

It helps you think.

It helps you connect with family and laugh.

That type of exposure and difference is cool, but you also have to do a little bit more, especially when you’re out of routine.

I told a story online and I shared a picture on one of our newsletters of me and the kids at the Step and Repeat at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, Texas.

And I wanted to see that place.

No one else in my group, the team wasn’t so interested, but as one of the team captains, I said, I want to go see this.

And we walked through Fort Worth, the stockyards area, and it was cool.

It was neat.

They got to see the animals and it was cobblestones and old-fashioned kind of Texas Western vibe.

And they thought that was cool.

Nothing about the weather was cool.

It was about 150,000 degrees and a million percent humidity.

But we went over to Billy Bob’s, which was like an icebox, which was great.

And we paid to get in and it was like a museum and I was excited to see it.

We played a couple of games of pool.

I got a beer.

My wife got a beer.

We got the kids sodas.

Super fun, right?

And I see the general manager over in the corner.

I introduce myself.

I say, hey, I’m working on this story about Texas and Texas music.

Can I ask you a couple of questions?

He said, yeah, sure.

And the kids are over playing video games.

I say, okay, thanks so much.

I really appreciate your time.

And then he gave us, no, no, we’re not done.

You and the family were going on a huge tour.

He showed us the entire space and it was so cool.

And we went backstage and we were on the stage and he showed us all the old wood and he explained it in a way that the kids thought was really interesting.

And for over an hour, we had the kids engaged in a thing that was just really for me.

And they really liked it.

And it was neat.

Even they kind of got that this was a big deal, right?

But I think it was because I was excited about it and they got that excitement.

And when you show your kids stuff you like and you care about, it doesn’t matter what it is.

Sometimes it matters what it is.

But for the most part, you should go into things that you want to see too.

You got to plan a little bit of that in that to build up that team feel.

It can’t all be laser tagged during the rain or water parks.

There has to be something that is a little different.

And I think that that will last.

Also, I got that really cool picture with me and my kids, where some of the most important country musicians in the world want to get their picture taken too.

So that to me was really neat.

And showing your kids what you find interesting will help them understand what they think is interesting.

And that’s something you can’t learn in a classroom.

That’s something you can’t learn, you know, sitting on the couch on your iPad after a day of camp either.

It’s so true that you should just take your kids to see stuff that you want to see and do things that you want to do as a father.

And I learned that lesson from a friend, a good personal friend of Mick’s.

Mick is the co-host of season one of Country Music Dads podcast, and so his friend Shannon Carpenter wrote a book called The Ultimate Stay At Home Dad.

And it blew my mind when I was learning how to be an effective stay at home dad, that he kind of gave me permission to go.

If you want to go to a museum, just take your kids.

They might roll their eyes.

But if they see you being excited about something, they’ll get something out of that.

They can sense the excitement.

And you’re going to be better about engaging with them, too, if you’re excited about whatever you’re going to go see, whether it’s Billy Bob’s or it’s a sporting event or whatever nerdy thing you’re into.

We’re about to embark on a family trip.

According to my wife, I inordinately love the Gold Rush.

I don’t know why.

She asked me once if there was any period of time that you would go back to and live there.

I said 1849 because that was the 49ers.

I was like, that must have been the apex, the Gold Rush.

I’d go back then.

It doesn’t matter how hard life was back then.

I just wanted to, I don’t know, just work in the hills, pan for gold.

Yeah, that’s pretty nerdy, man.

Homestead it.

Yeah.

Anyway, I’m taking the family for a weekend to Gold Country.

And I haven’t taken my kids there yet.

I actually, I made my wife go there with me right before we had kids.

So it was coming.

Yeah, she knew it was coming.

Yeah.

And thank you.

Thank you, Kim, by the way.

I’m so sorry, Kim.

Love it up there.

But yeah, I can’t wait.

And I can’t wait to see the eye rolls from the kids.

Or maybe they’ll be stoked about it too.

Or I don’t care.

I really don’t.

Because I will be there with my family who I love.

And it’s going to be a great memory for at least me.

And probably for all of us, because someone’s going to barf on the windy roads.

Someone’s going to barf.

And we’re going to remember it forever.

There’s gold up in them hills and in the crevices of your car seat.

That’s right.

Some of those techniques for excavating the car seat barf remnants are going to come in handy when I’m polishing up my little stone.

Oh my gosh.

There’s so much to mine in that particular, that little nugget of information.

All that to say, you don’t have to do just all the kid-friendly stuff.

I think I had an allergic reaction to that when I first became a parent and my kids were small.

It’s like, you got to go to the mommy and me class or the indoor playground or to spend all your days at the park.

No, you don’t actually.

You can just strap your kid to your chest until they’re a certain age or till they’re too heavy for you.

And you can go do whatever you want.

And that idea was kind of liberating for me.

Yeah, sorry, my new baby is going to be going to old country with me for years and years.

I mean, there is a reason.

Yeah, there’s no reason actually.

You can enjoy it and I can’t find a good reason to explain it.

You do you and expose your children to that and pass on that crazy.

You know, that’s important.

You know, that’s how we keep history alive.

It’s through passing on that crazy.

But yeah, I think that’s key.

I mean, I remember growing up going to museums and going to musicals and seeing theater and doing that type of stuff.

And I remember it from a pretty young age.

And we brought our kids until they screamed too much, literally, to every museum that we could go to.

And we lived in San Francisco.

There were a number of free museums that you could just go to.

And it was great.

And we would go all the time.

There’s really some fantastic pictures holding my oldest at the museum during that time period.

And I think that’s important.

You also get to remember it.

And you feel like you’re passing something down that you find important.

You also have to have a little bit of fun on this trip where you’ll jump out of the moving car.

You gotta have some fun.

It is also vacation, even though it’s not really vacation.

Well, it’s your one shot at vacation because you’re not getting more vacation time.

You took the time off.

Correct.

This is it.

We kind of talked about it a little bit, but what do your trips look like?

It seems like no matter how long the trip is, my minivan is packed to the ceiling.

Even if it’s just like an overnight, it doesn’t matter.

When I had one kid, my SUV was packed to the ceiling.

Now that I’ve got three, the minivan’s packed to the ceiling.

When number four comes along, I don’t know where she’s going to go, but I know that the minivan will be packed to the ceiling.

Those little things that you can put on the roof.

Oh, yeah.

I got one of those, the rocket box on top.

Yeah, that’s where you can put her.

And now I’ll just be strapping the thing.

Yeah.

She sleeps for most of it, right?

That’s where most fourth kids go, like somewhere outside of the car.

It’s okay.

You just strap them on.

Duct tape.

One of those little buggies alongside the motorcycle.

Yeah.

In a car seat, though.

Yeah, come on.

For collisions.

Come on.

Of course.

Safety first.

This is a dad’s podcast.

We’re very serious about this stuff.

Whether it’s skiing or camping, family trip or family vacation to me means packing.

I feel like I will never get good at packing.

I will never enjoy it, but I endure it better now having so much experience.

Kind of in a similar way, I think for me, free planning has not always been my strong suit.

I’ve taken a clue, my kids and what they need, and I’ve started creating schedule spreadsheets with opportunities and places to go and places to see with links and stuff.

And it brings me peace.

It grounds me in a way that I’m not proud to admit, though it was inevitable.

I mean, I am that guy.

That is amazing insight though, because you and I are very different.

I’m the spreadsheet guy and creating schedules and spreadsheets for all of our trips was driving me insane because I couldn’t deal with the uncertainty.

You’re coming from the other side or you’re a little more free flowing.

The structure is what’s helping you grow.

And for me, actually embracing more chaos has helped me handle the family trip better.

So look at that.

We’re both growing in our own way.

Yeah.

And we’re meeting in the middle.

We’re creating a space for all dads to grow and talk about barf on family trips.

Whether you’re the super planner type A dad or the go with the flow last minute dad, we can all agree that you’re going to clean up barf.

Yeah, that’s what’s going to happen.

Yeah.

The car seat is coming apart.

I threw one out once.

I just couldn’t do it.

No joke.

You should just have a few backup car seats and just just get rid of them.

Yeah.

This one was like six months to a year from expiration.

I was like, I’m not cleaning this.

I’m just throwing it out.

That’s a story for a different time.

It included flying solo and 105-degree temperature outside.

It was rough.

It’s always hot wherever you’re going.

I came back.

I took the car seat out and put it outside of the garage so that the animals wouldn’t come eat it inside the garage, wiped out the car, like the basic car and put the kid in the shower.

I was like, stay here.

If you puke, do it in the shower.

I washed most of myself off and 45 minutes to an hour went by before I could go get the car seat.

I was like, nope.

It was a Thursday night.

I was like, that’s just going in the trash.

I don’t care.

Baked into a barf casserole.

I need a minute.

So it was so gross.

Okay.

So jumping into a little bit of a trend that we’re seeing in social media, parenthood, stuff, and musically, the 90s are super hot right now.

So you have this neo-neo traditional revival and full swing and Zach Tup’s got this hot new summer song.

It’s not as good as his other summer songs, but whatever.

The thing we’re seeing a lot is we’ve got to let our kids have a 90s summer.

And we’re talking about that essentially here.

But here’s the trend.

Kids go outside and play, drink from the hose, come back inside if you’re bleeding a lot.

You know, I don’t want to see you until the streetlights come on type of thing.

There’s some benefits to that, right?

The idea that you just like get the hell out of here and go have fun and they figure stuff out.

They grow as people just like any other kind of nostalgic look back.

It’s not really what happened, right?

We’re not necessarily actually going outside to play the whole time.

The TV thing back when we were growing up, at least the options were a little bit more limited.

So, I remember watching TV and when like a baseball game would come on, you know, the Braves game would come on TBS.

It would just destroy whatever program I was looking forward to watching.

And then I’d have to move on and find something else to do.

But now, with the devices available and the endless opportunities to stream on demand, whatever you want, whenever you want it, I think kids with that much freedom are going to choose poorly, maybe worse than we did back then.

When you’re thinking back on it with, you mentioned in the intro, rose-colored glasses, those perfectly simple 90s summers, there was probably something else going on.

Yeah.

It just doesn’t make sense.

I mean, we have a difference of expectations today than we did before.

And I think some of that is right.

You know, we want our kids to get something out of this.

We know what’s better.

We do know what’s better.

We have more information than we did then.

Just like our parents had more information than our grandparents did.

And so, you know, we address problems differently.

We encourage our kids to play differently.

But there’s this concept of scheduling and scheduling, and scheduling and scheduling, and specializing and specializing and specializing and specializing.

We gotta let kids be kids a little bit.

Let them go out.

Let them play.

Let them set up a card stand on the corner and hold up some cardboard signs saying, you know, baseball cards for sale, and let them get sunburned doing that for a couple hours of a summer day.

That’s an important learning experience.

I never made $57 in an hour like my kid did earlier this week, doing that.

I’m a little pissed because those were my cards that he was selling, but I’ll get over it.

But this concept of creating this perfect schedule all the time for our kids needs balance.

You need to do both.

You need to let them be kids and have fun and do something that’s silly and fun.

But you also got to be real.

Like it’s not the 90s anymore.

I mean, I was kind of aspiring for that kind of an unstructured summer as a stay-at-home dad.

I have the luxury to not need to schedule camps for my kids every single week of the summer.

And so that was in my ideal situation.

That’s kind of what I was going for.

But you’re right.

The expectation is different that like you got to make something every summer.

And so I have the last few summers kind of internalized that pressure.

And felt like if they’re not going to summer camp for robotics and basketball and surfing and all the other stuff that their peers are going to, I got to create some curriculum for them so that they’re not just wasting away.

And also so they’re not just bothering me all summer.

I’m hoping that I’m going to end up in a more balanced place where yeah, I’m going to be intentional about like, let’s do something creative.

We were talking about how like educational opportunities arise out of just stuff that you want to go out and do yourself, like just things that you do as a family.

And it doesn’t have to be strategically planned or blessed by an educational body.

One of the pieces of literature that we looked at was the Journal of Leisure Research, which I just personally find to be an absolutely fantastic field of research.

But this piece came out in 2009, so it was a long time ago.

And I think that there have probably been some changes in the way that we interact.

In that time period, I can think of a few major changes that have happened in our world.

I like this one because this one was called Family Leisure Satisfaction and Satisfaction with Family Life Study.

From four professors, researchers, from…

Yeah, talk about first world problems.

Yes.

Are we satisfied enough with our leisure?

Right.

Let’s study.

But I think what they were getting at, and this is kind of what we’re all trying to get at here, is that these changes that you make in your daily life lead to more satisfaction in your daily life.

And by doing this, you allow yourself something a little bit different.

And by doing that, you’re setting your kids up for educational success.

You’re setting yourself up for long-term memories.

And it doesn’t need to be as crazy, complicated as we make it.

And going to what you were saying, like you feel pressured to a academically strenuous and rigorous schedule for your kids.

And I have to find camps for our kids, or they’ll burn our house down.

You know, these are things that are a lot, and it’s a lot of scheduling, it’s very similar to school.

Those weeks or long weekends, or even just like easy trips to change things, or creating vacation, right?

Taking a day off here or there.

Can’t go to Paris this year, because it’s just in the cards.

Yeah, you make Paris at home.

You talk about the Eiffel Tower, you make it out of popsicle sticks, you eat baguettes and wear berets and eat cheese, and say bonjour all the time, and everybody thinks it’s silly, or they roll their eyes at you, but you keep talking like these, and it’s fun, and it’s silly, and it’s something that you can create memories out of.

What I’m hearing is that there’s an opportunity for me to create gold country at home.

I hear that too.

Yes.

Can’t wait.

That’s what’s gonna happen.

So even after the incredible opportunity to come over to Dave’s house and pan for gold, this critical discussion should also be couched a little bit in the fact that it is summer vacation, it is a time away from school, and it’s great for kids.

And popular culture wants to jam an entire year’s worth of living into three-ish months of great times.

I would argue the most important piece of pop culture is the song of the summer.

And there are some great, fabulous, iconic country songs of the summer.

Dave, what’s your go-to?

The first thing that comes to mind when you think of summertime country songs, it’s Alan Jackson.

To me, it’s always Alan Jackson and he is a tough person to unseat from the song of the summer and country music.

I feel like Zack Top with his new song, The Summer, he’s just ramping up his Alan Jackson impression, like real twangy.

One of my favorites for summer is Good Time by Alan Jackson.

Because the beat, the music video, everyone’s line dancing on like tractor trailers or flatbed trailers.

And I was just, I was really reaching for a song that’s not Chattahoochee, honestly, to be honest with you.

That’s fair, that’s fair.

But that one is, Good Time is a great song too, that just, it evokes that same, it’s a party song.

You’re outside, on the lawn chair type of a song.

Timeless.

You can’t beat Chattahoochee.

I don’t think so.

Yeah, it’s like, I wanted, we wanted to share more songs, but, I think that’s fair.

I mean, I had a long conversation with someone.

I respect a great deal about Country Music, and we were talking, we went down an unbelievably nerdy rabbit hole about neo-traditional and neo-neo-traditional and other genre, sub-genres within Country Music.

And he made me listen to an ungodly amount of Alan Jackson.

And I was like, okay, this is good.

It sounds like Alan Jackson.

I now get it.

You know, it was like, don’t listen to the top 50 hits.

Listen to the B sides of everything.

And I was like, Alan Jackson, Deep Cut.

I was like, okay, these are all good songs.

They’re well written.

They’re well performed.

They sound like Alan Jackson.

I have now done my due diligence.

I feel like I’m not an Alan Jackson expert, but I feel like I’ve been exposed to a lot of Alan Jackson.

And a vast majority of what he has to play is not Song of Summer stuff.

It’s much sadder and much more downtrodden.

That being said, speaking of people who make downtrodden music, Turnpike Troubadour’s Hot Summer Day, which was originally written by John Hartford.

But to me, that song is a Turnpike Troubadour song.

It is.

I’m sweating.

It’s disgusting outside.

Maybe I’m visiting family in Oklahoma and it’s three million percent humidity and we’re melting.

It’s the third water feature of the day because it’s just that hot.

That’s that song.

And that is like, I’m gonna have a cold beer and things are gonna be okay.

And like, I love that song.

It’s driving.

It’s fun.

It’s a good.

I just like it.

It’s a good song.

What can I say?

That’s a banger, man.

Yeah, I’ll change gears.

A lot of what we’ve talked about and probably a lot of my input to our conversation has been kind of the negative parts of your summer vacation, your summer with the kids.

Things Have Gone to Pieces by George Jones.

That’s a go-to for many seasons of my life and Summer Counts, because inevitably, as we’ve discussed, things fall apart while you’re out on trips with your kids.

And this song is just the little mundane things, the minutia of things that go wrong in everyday life.

If George Jones can be sad about those things, then I can too.

Yes.

Yeah, man, on those trips in the Summer, little things just start to add up until suddenly you’re singing Things Have Gone to Pieces at the top of your lungs while your kids are screaming in the backseat.

Yes.

I think that’s fair and probably an anthem for vomit cleanup as well.

But then that one on repeat when you’re disassembling the car seat the next time.

Yes.

I don’t really listen to music when I’m doing that.

I just try to grit my teeth and hope it’s over soon.

Yeah.

You don’t want to ruin a good George Jones song by associating it with barf cleanup either.

So it’s a slippery slope.

Always is.

Oh man.

Taking a turn back to the more positive, Honky Tonkin for Life by Hannah Juanita is like this great romping danceable honky tonk song.

I like it.

I think it’s good times.

It’s like easy to listen to.

She has other songs that are a little bit deeper, or like you have to think a little bit about the lyrics.

This one’s like, all right, we’re going to honk-tonk, we’re going to dance, and the kids can sing along to it because they don’t get it, all of it, or they’re not listening to it, I don’t care.

But it’s a great driving song.

You’re not driving too fast, which is good because there are some that are way too fast.

You get in a lot of trouble, and that’s a whole different story.

That’s a good song that I like listening to when it’s warm outside.

It was a good song.

It came out.

Good song now.

I’m pretty excited about it.

We touched on Zaktop.

What’s your favorite Zaktop summer song?

It’s hard to beat Cold Beer and Country Music because that’s what I want in the summer.

Those are the things that I’d like to enjoy when it’s hot out.

As we’ve mentioned, it’s important to invest in yourself, dads and moms.

It’s not usually the summer is about the kids, the summer vacations are about the kids, but you got to carve out a little time for yourself.

And Cold Beer and Country Music, Zack Top evoking the spirit of Alan Jackson.

I was just going to say Alan Jackson, right?

In case you want to take a break from all the Alan Jackson songs.

You could listen to Zack Top instead.

Yeah, his new song Good Times and Tan Lines, I got to say, I feel like he was like, how could I make this even more Alan Jackson?

I don’t think it’s as good as Cold Beer and Country Music.

The one critique of many that I could do about this song is that it dismisses a lot of probably good mental health approaches.

Like I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to talk to a shrink, I don’t want to dance, I don’t want to have a conversation with a friend, I just want to beer and listen to country music at the bar.

Probably not the healthiest choice, but sometimes you just got to do that.

And so, he’s young, so we’ll let him pass on that.

Yeah, not the most healthy approach, but still good.

He’ll learn, he’ll learn more eventually.

Or he won’t, and whatever.

Makes good music.

What else you got?

I’ll throw in kind of a curveball here, Denim and Diamond.

Not so much an anthem for the guys.

Nikki Lane’s song off of her last album, she’s got another one coming out.

That one is a good message for perhaps young women listening in the car behind you.

This one, the line that got me is, I can do whatever I want to, all by my lonesome.

And I think there’s some hope in that for the parents who are stuck in said family trip car, but also, it’s a driving song.

It’s got to drive and be.

And I like that.

The last song I’ll talk about is, It’s a Great Day to Be Alive by Travis Tritt.

And that’s because I’ve been negative a little bit about the family trips, but they are good and they do create good memories.

And I’m glad that I take them despite some of the work and some of the hardship that happens.

I feel like I saw something on my Instagram feed about like a suggestion that dads, even if you’re not feeling it that day, if you’re not in a good mood, you still need to show up for your kids and kind of pretend like you’re in a good mood because they’re looking to you for guidance.

That’s kind of a mental health trick also to just state the opposite of what you’re feeling.

So maybe if you’re not having the best day on your summer family trip, you can fire up the song, play it loud enough to drown out the crying baby in the back or the incessant, when are we going to get there, how much longer, with it’s a great day to be alive.

And if you sing it loud enough and enough times in a row, maybe you’ll start to believe it.

I could quote Joseph Goebbels right now, but I’m not going to.

Bring our level up here.

Yes, let’s talk about Nazi propaganda.

But yeah, playing a song that just pushes you through is the way to go.

It’s like when the kid’s still crying and whining about whatever it is and you go, you know what?

I’m just going to tickle you until you laugh.

And sometimes that works.

Yes, Travis Tritt’s great, It’s a Great Day to Be Alive, is the tickle fight approach to managing the backseat.

So our next segment is a recurring segment that we like to call Change My Mind.

In a world where flexibility and opinion is seen as a weakness, we want to model good behavior to our kids and listeners as we respectfully and humorously try to change each other’s mind about pressing issues of country music, fatherhood, and other nonsense.

As we’ve discussed at length, traveling with your kids is hard, and it can fray the nerves of even the most mindful and mellow dads.

And in these moments of struggle, dads have been known to use some colorful language to express their heightened emotions.

However, I see these instances as momentary lapses in judgment and something I kind of feel bad about.

Because as a rule, you shouldn’t cuss in front of your kids.

Donnie, change my f***ing mind.

Dave, you should watch your mouth there.

Look, swearing helps everything, man.

There are tons of academic studies that show that using profanity can help you deal with pain, suffering, struggle and strife.

It is a mental game.

It is a play on this.

And we’ll list a number of these kind of sources so that you too can tell your preschool teacher why your youngest is dropping the F bomb in class.

It’s good for them.

I joke a little bit about that, but the real reason I don’t think it’s important to have a hard and fast rule against this is that the kids are gonna hear this stuff.

And hearing it from your parents sometimes takes down the cachet, the naughtiness of it all.

Also, I need to say these things sometimes.

I need this in my life to be able to get the anger and frustration out, so that I can take that physiological and psychological benefit of dropping an F-bomb when I’m really, really frustrated.

It’s not good.

I’m not gonna pretend like it’s good for my kids to hear me curse, but I think it’s important for me to have an outlet in which I don’t put my hand through a wall and I just say, f**k, really loud.

And I just say it into the corner and it goes away and it’s done.

And it also signifies that dad’s really histo.

And I try not to do it all the time.

I just don’t have a hard and fast rule not to do it.

Those two reasons are important for me.

The release personally and also like demystifying it.

And then that way they kind of know what it is.

My oldest is afraid to use it.

He doesn’t like it.

He doesn’t like it.

When we do it, he knows that he’s in trouble, usually when that is taking place.

Cause it’s, you know, hour three of whatever mouth down we’re on when that takes place.

No one has ever accused me of being the most mindful or mellow dad ever.

I am like not that guy in any way, shape or form, but this helps me kind of regulate.

My youngest on the other hand does like to use these terms and uses them properly and with abandon.

Not outside of the house though.

And we have made that a rule.

Is that, look.

That’s a good distinction.

Yeah.

You can say these things.

You can’t say them to people.

You can’t say them about people.

You can’t use them towards your brother or towards your mother.

Hopefully not towards me, but that usually doesn’t work out so well.

Well, for me, what becomes important is this fact that they feel safe to use whatever language, however they want to express themselves at home.

Because they’re gonna hear this stuff on the playground.

They’re gonna hear this stuff on the field.

They’re gonna hear it in the classroom.

I was behind a corner at a baseball practice much earlier this season for my oldest, and I’m not on his coaching staff for any number of reasons.

And I came around the corner.

One of the nicest, you know, softest spoken kids on the team just goes, Ah, you bleepin mother bleeper bleep the bleep bleep bleep.

It was like unbelievable bevy of impressive strung together hyphenated curse words.

And I was like, all right, well done.

I’m impressed.

And especially from you.

I did not expect it from him.

But he dropped it.

And he’s like, I can’t believe you did this and you mother.

All of it.

It was unbelievable.

And I turned around the corner like, what the f**k?

And that shocked him.

Like right out of it.

And he, you know, he knew he shouldn’t have done that.

The tool that I had and I was able to use, stopped him, made the other guy laugh, who was getting yelled at.

And the coach kind of gave me like one of these and I left.

And, you know, I got out of the practice.

But like, it’s a tool.

And I think like any other tool, you can’t overuse it.

And I don’t think that it’s important to do it.

I don’t, and we didn’t use it as much until our oldest was much older and our youngest was hearing it from his older brother.

Anyway, the F word is a useful tool.

Saying other words can help you feel better.

And that’s really good, in my opinion, to create a space where kids feel comfortable to express themselves.

And maybe I’m just justifying my foul mouth.

But I have one.

Maybe that’s why they won’t let you coach the team.

Is that the reason, the profanity?

I coach T-ball.

It’s cool.

Those f**kers are great.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You can definitely allow for a lapse of judgment, but also you can allow yourself to feel that level of frustration grow inside of you.

And if you don’t put it somewhere, especially for me as a guy who is not mellow and is working hard on trying to be better at this, I need the tool.

I need the tool to be able to do it, so I don’t do something else, you know?

And there are times when it’s the only way that I’m going to feel better.

I just, I got to drop that f-bomb and deal with it.

The way that we approach the language thing, because you’re totally right.

My son’s in first grade, and he’s heard these naughty words.

He knows they’re bad, even though we haven’t taught him that they’re bad.

He just, he gets that from the community somehow.

I think our message to him is more, I don’t want to come down hard on him and be like, you shall never say these words.

Because I do think that it’s just, it’s part of just language in general, and you can’t avoid it entirely.

You can’t shelter your kids from hearing the naughty words.

The way we try to talk about it is that, that like you can have better words.

You can better express what’s happening to you.

You don’t have to resort to using these words.

And at a certain point, when he gets to a certain age, I don’t cuss a whole lot in general.

That’s just not like part of my, who I am.

But I will for effect.

If I’m, like you said, if you’re extra angry, you need to make a point.

Sometimes to be funny, it works.

At a certain age, I want him, I want all my sons to understand that also, that there could be a time and place, but it shouldn’t be a habit.

And you kind of touched on that too.

So when I say that it’s as a rule, I don’t cuss in front of my kids, it’s more, I should have said as a habit, I don’t cuss in front of my kids.

It’s not like something that I want to normalize in our household.

That I want them to use their language intentionally.

One of Kim’s favorite words isn’t a curse word.

She likes to call people buttholes.

I’ve been encouraging her in front of our kids to elevate her language and don’t just call our son a butthole when he’s being one.

Being a butthole.

Yeah.

One of my favorite words is penultimate, but that has nothing to do with this.

I respect that, I really do.

I can’t do it.

We got some challenging big feelings and reactions to those that are highly frustrating.

They just are highly frustrating.

And my work is to be better at that.

But I know that one of my coping mechanisms is saying the F word.

Everybody has their crutch.

And that’s mine.

One of many, I suppose.

But language being used intentionally and using the right words is something that is fun.

And I have never stopped using big, scary, complicated words in front of my kids.

Penultimate is legitimately one of my favorite words.

And it is pretentious and snotty.

But I use it with my kids and my oldest knows what it means now.

If you don’t want to look it up and you don’t know what it means, no shame at all.

It means second to last, which you could just say second to last.

But penultimate just sounds so much snottier.

So you get to say that.

Much like penultimate is a great word with a lot of utility in select times and places.

So is f**k.

It’s a great word.

You could use it in many different ways.

There’s all sorts of great stuff.

There’s this great book that I read, and it was featured on the Colbert Report like a million years ago.

I was in college.

I stood in the bookstore and read it.

It was called On Bullshit.

And this book explained why that term is so fabulous.

You can call something BS.

It can be BS.

You can call someone BS.

And it feels so good to say because there’s so much in it.

But then there’s also BSing.

And there’s just so many different ways to utilize this term that allows the zeitgeist and the feelings and all that other stuff to just come together.

And perhaps that’s why we talk on podcasts, is to get into all of that bullshit.

But what a beautiful way to end.

There it is.

A great conversation about summer vacation, our families and all of our family traditions.

Bullshit ones or otherwise.

Thank you all for listening.

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So send us comments, suggestions, or friendly banter on Instagram at countrymusictads, or via email countrymusictads.gmail.com.

Stay tuned for our next episode when we welcome Sideman, Frontman, and Radioman.

Host of The Boots and Saddle Show, Sean Burns, your new best friend, to talk about balancing life as a parent, his art, and how he defines real country music.

Until next time, whether you’re at the dance hall, the playground, or the schoolyard, or just folding some laundry, thanks for tuning in.

We’ll talk to you soon.

I was just about to say, you f**kers.

We’re on the same wavelength, man.

I’m usually the make the coffee and breakfast guy, as my wife does not get up as springily.

She doesn’t get up as readily.

I don’t know what the right word is.

Anywho, I’m gonna get in trouble for that.

Springily is what you’re looking for.

Springily.

Springily.

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