Nick and my vacations were often impromptu trips.  We didn’t call these spur-of-the-moment trips vacations, we called them adventures.

When Nick was 8 years old, I learned that there was one aspect to my willingness to figure things out as we went that was a serious source of stress for him.

We were at the barbershop on a Saturday morning.  While Nick was in the chair getting his hair cut, I was reading a magazine about the new movie we had just seen, Star Trek 4 – The Voyage Home.  This was the time-travel Star Trek in which whales saved the world. The article showed how some of the whale scenes were shot at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

I showed Nick the article and suggested we should go to the Aquarium to check out the movie scenes and to see all the sea creatures.  As Nick was as enthusiastic as I was, we drove straight from the barbershop in Redondo to the Aquarium in Monterey.  That’s a 300+ mile trip that took about five hours.

One problem.  We got to the Aquarium just an hour before closing time.  No problem; we’d visit for an hour, spend the night in a local hotel and return to the Aquarium Sunday morning.  This would give us plenty of time to complete our visit and drive home to get Nick in bed at his usual hour.

So we spent our first hour mostly looking at the parts of the Aquarium we recognized from the movie.  We went to dinner, probably at Denny’s if I am remembering Nick’s 8-year-old food preferences, and used the lobby payphone to find a hotel for the night

Star Trek 4 came out in 1986.  No internet.  No cell phones.

Nick was showing signs of anxiety after the second hotel I called said they were fully booked.  “Where will we sleep?!”  By the time I ran out of dimes for the phone, and had run out of hotel brand names I knew, Nick was visibly upset over the uncertainty of where we would spend the night.  I tried to be reassuring, but not very successfully.

Monterey is a tourist town and there are lots of motels. But most were locally owned, unfamiliar names and I was not willing to commit to an unknown over the phone.  We had passed at least a dozen on the main road from Highway One into Monterey, Munras Ave.  So we drove back toward the highway checking out motels.  Letting Nick share his opinion on whether they looked “friendly” or looked like a “dump” I think help relieve some of his anxiety, or it at least gave him something different to focus on for a while.  Fortunately, we found a room at our second stop.  Nick declared it ‘friendly’ as we drove into its nearly full parking lot.  It was an old fashioned motor court; single story with each room opening to the parking lot.  The room was clean, well furnished, quaint in a grandma kind of way.

When we checked in, I explained to the lady at the desk how we came to be looking for a room.  When I asked if there was a store nearby where I could buy some toothbrushes, she gave me a couple of complimentary toiletry kits with all the essentials we would need in the morning.  The TV worked and Nick had a bed for the night, so all was well.

We got up the next morning, found some breakfast and headed back to the Aquarium where we stayed until mid-afternoon enjoying all of the exhibits.  Two that still stand out were the stingray pool and (my favorite) the jellyfish.  The stingrays were in a shallow pool where Nick could sit on the edge and touch them as they swam by.  The jellyfish were miniscule.  The only jellyfish I knew were in the Chesapeake Bay, and they were not small.  These were as small as grains of rice and there were hundreds of them constantly moving about.

The drive home was scenic, back down twisty scenic Highway One, but otherwise uneventful.  We got home in time to get back into our Sunday night before school and work routine.

I was glad I learned how Nick viewed my lack of planning for our adventures.  Never again did we strike out on a last-minute adventure without at least having a hotel reservation, or a tent in the trunk.