Flash back to the first week of school, during those formative elementary years, when you received substantial credit for writing your one-page composition entitled “My Summer Vacation.”

The monumental prose, scripted with a chubby pencil and wide-ruled sheets on your brand-new tablet, succinctly condensed an entire season into a few sentences, heroically bypassing rules of grammar.

I always envied the kids who got to round out their stories with bodily fluids and tales of exotic lands, like Minnesota. Some of us had to get pretty creative to write the compulsory two paragraphs, as the term “family vacation” was as foreign as a national park, and body fluids lurked uneventfully under the epidermis.

By virtue of our status as land-locked kids in a municipality without a swimming pool, my sister and I did not have many diversions off home-base.

We were either in a geriatric neighborhood or on a farm, and in conjunction with my non-traveling parents, we spent our summers occupied by 4-H, several grandparent figures, and closing down the public library.

Our family outings were always to stay with other family members, sometimes in other parts of western Iowa. Trips to Grandma’s house were marked with trips to the pool, and trips to visit our cousins usually resulted in three days of playing with pets, fighting and craft projects.

Then there was the Iowa State Fair. The county fair organizers had a crystal ball somewhere in the bowels of the county extension office.

In muted, sinister tones, they would ask the ball which day of the year would be the most muggy and miserable; the day that would send people into the sauna for relief. The 4-H leaders would hover over the crystal ball, anxiously awaiting the response.

That was how our exhibit days were selected for the state 4-H presentations.

Despite the obvious climatological attempts to thwart our fun, the State Fair was the one time every year we could get out of Dodge, so to speak. My father, an avid proponent of back-road travel, would manage take us from northwest Iowa to Des Moines every year using completely different routes.

My mom routinely complains of going through “podunk towns” on our way anywhere, and my dad serenely queries what other variety of town she expects to pass through.

So tuned in to an oldies station, we would hit the road for a long day of sweating, five-dollar slurpies, and most foods fried and impaled on a stick.

I love the State Fair.

Once we attempted a family vacation. Emulating our pioneer forebearers, we loaded down the car with exponentially more than the average family would have taken for Westward Expansion.

We took off on I-90, through the unexplored and exotic land of South Dakota. Destination – four presidents, some billboards and uninterrupted consumption of fast food for nearly a week. The first sign of trouble was when my sister, prone to motion sickness, herfed all over the inside of a closed automobile.

To add to the excitement, the Black Hills were not prone to the saturating, stifling, triple-digit humidity characteristic of our fair state in August.

One would assume that after fifteen years of Iowa summers, the family vacation after my freshman year of high school would have gotten me hooked on family travel.

However, the brutal truth of family dynamics tends to surface after prolonged stints in a Dodge Omni whose air conditioning system is as extinct as the leisure suit.

After all of us contracted what my father later delicately termed as `some sort of amoeba,’ the transmission gave up the ghost and had to be replaced on the road, and we drove through a storm of locusts, I decided family vacations were not experiences I would ever care to replicate.

The drive home was longer than taking a schooner on the Oregon Trail. I had never been so overjoyed to see our house.

Happy to be alive, relieved to be out of our ill-fated car, and glad to be home, for the first time I returned to school with plenty of fodder for that composition.

I looked at my classmates who had taken family vacations and looked upon them not with my previous envy, but with amazement. They all survived.

Rachel Faber Machacha is a graduate student from Emmetsburg.