So in Pictures from Our Vacation, it’s a combination of invented things and things that actually happened and things that our kids experienced and thoughts that I had myself. The scene where they run out the pier onto the gazebo and get stuck there in a rainstorm with a Vietnamese family was something that actually happened.
It just, I remember at the time thinking, you know they were speaking Vietnamese and we were speaking in English and I thought how funny, we were probably saying the exact same things but, but who would know? My husband has, his family has an old farmhouse in Ontario that’s been in their family for 150 years. In fact in the kitchen there’s a little door you can open and you can see the log cabin that’s still inside the house.
It was, you know, built around the log cabin. So, the year we took our kids there for maybe the first time, everything went wrong. And we were convinced, you know it did rain a lot, just all kinds of things happened. And we were convinced that they were having a terrible time and as we were pulling out the driveway of the farmhouse to come home, our daughter who was you know she was maybe seven or something.
And she said you know next time we come I want to la, la, la, la and I thought wow, she wants to come again because we were thinking they’re never going to want to come here again and it started me thinking you know about vacations I had experienced and how we, we think kids need this Disney perfect experience but I think for kids any experience is an experience and how you handle it with them makes it whether it’s an experience they enjoy or not.
You know I mean I have this vivid memory of that trip, we had gone to visit a little neighboring town and we’re stopping in shops and we were walking down a street and it started pouring again and so we all huddled inside this doorway you know the four of us inside this doorway waiting for the rain to end and there was something kind of wonderful about that.
So I thought you know, I think kids could relate to just experiencing things that are interesting not just you know, rainbows and sunshine all the time. So that was one of my impetuses for that trip, for that book.