Ammi Midstokke: Vacation for the perma-campers

As my entire childhood was a long family wilderness vacation, I am not versed in the idea of organizing the mind-boggling logistics it takes to facilitate spending time together somewhere outside of the home. As if we don’t relationship enough there already.

Also, my house is kind of like glamping, only we can’t buy $5 bundles of firewood. Where do people like us even go on vacation?

The answer to that is “a five-star spa on a white sand beach.” But we were bringing the kids and Kentucky was signed up for one of those modern warrior simulations that are so popular these days, though have less loss of life than back in 300 AD. I thought we might want to engage the children in some form of slave labor history that is deemed “entertainment” to the modern masses, such as going to a gold mine town, a pilgrim village, or Civil War battlefields.

Yet even that seems much like our every day-to-day life, though the children have hoodwinked me into actually paying them an allowance now. If I could get my hands on the softie parent who instilled that bit of nonsense household culture…

Our family getaway would be absolutely fulfilling and novel if we had electric heat and television. We want to vacation in civilization – where they have street lights and you can walk to a restaurant. Or anywhere you can ride a mountain bike.

It takes us roughly two days to actually organize ourselves for a weekend trip. The kids need bike helmets and gloves and for the love of God where is your other shoe?! The Captain needs to design an intricate system of webbing that ensures none of the six bikes we’re taking actually touch each other (this failed, mind you, and I am in the market for a giant roll of bubble wrap for future trips).

Then of course we need hippie family food. We’re not actually real hippies, we just eat like them, as if they all had weird food allergies. Our food snobbery (organic grass fed or wild game only please) makes us both pretentious in restaurants and short on friends who invite us over for dinner.

Therefore, packing food for our excursions costs more than the excursion itself, plus requires a certain amount of mathematical prowess as I am inevitably doing some nutritional experiment in which I must eat a specific-to-the-gram amount of protein on any given day. I am well aware of the kind of patience it takes to be my partner.

I had this fool-proof plan for the family vacation that didn’t feel like a family vacation: We would go to the Whitefish Bike Retreat and stay in the lodge. The kids, however, would stay in the campground that we can see from the kitchen window. It was so genius, I spent a week grinning at my ability to outsmart the parenting gods.

Those gods then dropped three days of downpour rain on Western Montana. The sliver of consciousness that remains in my cold heart told me that staring out the window through the bleak 39 degrees of gloom while my children huddled in their tent might actually detract from my joy of getting away. So we put them up in a bunk room in the lodge as well.

Between my childhood of having a tent as a bedroom, and my previous Euro-life of family vacation drinking fancy coffee at the Louvre with eight billion other people, I was under the impression that going places as a family was stressful and pointless. Until now.

First of all, the lodge has power – the kind where you don’t have to run a generator if you want to use the vacuum. Not that you have to because they also have fairies or gnomes or something that come and clean up after you leave (speaking of genius). Second, it has a full kitchen.

Here’s a secret about people who talk about food and teach cooking classes and stuff: We love to cook but we usually don’t have energy or time to do that in real life because we’re busy showing other people. Or we took a lightweight backpacking trip by ourselves and brought instant coffee and Lara bars.

As it turns out, we found our perfect family vacation at the Whitefish Bike Retreat. The lodge has queen rooms (grown up isolation!) and bunk rooms (go giggle until midnight if you want!). It also has a delightfully designed kitchen, which should be criteria for any vacationers who like to cook or have gobs of urchin children to feed.

There are networks of trails for kids to romp around on, skills courses, and general forest tomfoolery to be had right there. We could ignore the children for hours, then wrangle them in occasionally to fuel them. They satisfied their need for electronic brain washing by watching a Disney movie on a big screen (as opposed to my iPhone).

Somehow, the vacation was a pleasant visit to home-away-from-home and managed to meet all our holiday requirements. I crashed my bike a few times. We bought lame souvenirs. Everyone came back exhausted and happy to be home where we could return to our usual ways of chopping firewood and priming the pump.