Family Travel

There was a family on the train this morning that caught my attention. Okay, to be fair, I only assume that they were a family, the group sitting in three rows at the end of the car facing me and on the opposite side of the aisle could have been six completely unrelated people who just happened to be the only six oriental people in the car.

But what caught my attention was not the apparent nationality of the group. (They were oriental as we use the word in the states; by which I mean from China, Japan, Korea, the Asian area of the world. Over here, they use "Oriental" to include the Indian sub-continent.)

The family was a group of six, the parents sitting in the front of the three rows they occupied, the elder children, a girl and a boy, sitting in the next row and two little boys sitting in the third row. That is what caught my attention. The constituency of the family was identical to mine. (Add a daschund named Schatzie and a station wagon and the comparison would be complete.)

In an extended comparison to my family, the mother was listening to music on her MP3 player - had they existed then, I am pretty certain mother would have had one and would have sung along with it the entire drive to Minnesota. The little girl, a year-or-so older than her next brother, kept leaning over to him and telling him to sit still. The little boys in the back row kept poking and prodding each other, probably in an attempt to annoy each other as much as to pass the boring trip on the train.

The father, in what I can only assume was an attempt to pretend that the children were behaving, was reading a book. It put me in mind of the family vacations we took as a kid.

Granted, we would never take international trips and almost never took one that wasn't in the station wagon, but as we passed the twenty minutes from Surbiton to Waterloo, the oriental family across the aisle morphed in my mind into Dad, Mom, Mary, Denis, Chip and me in the station wagon on the way to Juniper Springs.

Why is it that a trip of only about three hundred miles seemed to take all day? We'd leave well before sunrise and I swear that we would never get there before sunset - well, at least that is how it was in my mind!

I used to love going to Juniper Springs! They had this great water wheel (that apparently used to run a small electric generator for the ranger station) that we would always want to go and see right a way, the massive wooden wheel being spun by the power of the water passing out of the spring into the creek. Soon we'd be swimming in the cold water of the springs and canoeing down the creek to Lake George.

My reverie was dispersed when the tannoy came to life with the train guard announcing our imminent arrival at Waterloo. The wheel I was seeing now was far larger than the waterwheel at Juniper Springs, the London Eye peeked over the buildings at me from its position over the Thames. Silently, I thanked the family for the brief trip to Florida as I collected my belongings and prepared to leave the train.

Wherever you are today, I hope you have a pleasant day!

Don Bergquist - 09 June 2007 - Thames Ditton, Surrey