I scoff at your family vacations.

Picture, a Brady Bunch station wagon. Parents in the front seat. 3 kids in the back seat. 2 kids in the rear seat (you know, the one that faces backwards, the one that is, I believe, illegal now). Driving for 2 solid days to get to the grandparent's house in Alabama. Driving another day to get to the other set of relatives.

5 kids in one station wagon=lots of shoving, fighting and whining.

5 kids in one station wagon=stressed parents and a mother with impeccable aim with a plastic flyswatter. Seriously, she kept a flyswatter on the seat next to her and without even turning around could THWAP the misbehaving child's thigh.

We played 20 questions, that "I'm going to ___ and I'm taking..." memory game, Super Quiz, MasterMind... and there was some magnetic travel game we had. I can picture the case but I can't think what it was. Oh, it might have been Parcheesi! Which is the slowest, dullest board game in the world, so really the only time you'd want to play it is on a long car trip.

But mostly I think there was lots of Password. Which led, inevitably, to the great Password cheating scandal. I can't wait till my nephew is old enough to carry on the family traditions.

I don't remember fighting with my brother much in the car. I think being 5 years apart helped. I do remember that sometimes I would stretch out on the floor (since I was smaller), and he would stretch out on the seat. So to this

Kids these days, with their DVD players in their cars....

I've never been able to read without getting carsick, unfortunately. Though far worse was the reverse seat in the back of the station wagon. Makes me nauseated just thinking about.

I could read in the car or on a train. I could ride backwards in the car or on a train. My mother never could. And after years of her saying, "I could never do that, I would feel so nauseated," I started feeling nauseated.

5 kids in one station wagon=lots of shoving, fighting and whining

Dude. 10 kids in a camper van. (And that's just 10 at any one time while I was still living with my parents. The count eventually got up to 15.)

Dude. 10 kids in a camper van. (And that's just 10 at any one time while I was still living with my parents. The count eventually got up to 15.)

There is no way I would have survived this. None. I'd have escaped at a rest area, picked up by some shady character and sold into child slavery.

We reenacted every Three Stooges film we'd ever seen.

This would just give me further impetus to escape, I'm afraid.

We always took driving vacations when I was a kid, but we had an RV so my brother and I weren't forced to sit next to each other or sit in one place for long (this is way before the seatbelt rules). Although there is one memorable trip in which my dad got a ticket for playing Battleship with my brother and I while he was driving.

When I was really little, my family used to drive back and forth to Florida a lot. I don't really remember those but that's probably just as well.

I do have vivid memories of going on short day-trips with my mom, stepdad and siblings. Mostly because 2 adults + 4 kids + 1 Honda Civic Hatchback = me and my stepsister in the trunk of the car. I never arrived anywhere without a headache from banging my head on the roof.

My worst childhood travel memories are of the times spent trying to sleep on hot nights in the camper, listening to my dad snoring and people coming and going at the wayside where my dad decided to stop for the night.

Sometimes there were mosquitoes, so we'd burn these spiral-shaped thingies to keep them away.