The family heads for the hills one last time

We just returned from what I am now calling our Last Family Vacation House Rental.

We’ve been renting houses out West or in the mountains of North Carolina for 25 years, starting when we took our teenage kids to Montana for several summers. We’ve stayed everywhere from a double-wide trailer on the Bitterroot River to a log cabin in the outback of Asheville, N.C., to a spread built by Malcolm Forbes outside Yellowstone. Most of the time, it was terrific. Sometimes it was life-changing. Those were the best of times.

But everything changes, as we know.

When our adventures began decades ago, it was the four of us, the nuclear unit, which, of course, is radioactive enough. Now we are 10, three families living in three different states — our kids and their spouses and four grandkids, ages 9, 7, 5 and 3. This year we rented two houses in Colorado for five days each, one in Boulder and one at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, near Estes Park.

One way to look at the experience is that the kiddies had a blast. That was one of the best parts. They slept in four bunk beds in one bedroom, got to swim, hike, eat junk food, overdose on videos and swing over a creek on an old tire suspended from a tree in the backyard. They had their moms and dads, their cousins, their aunts and uncles and their grandparents under one roof for 10 days. That’s the reason we plan these outings. My husband and I get to wake up and have breakfast with our grandkids every day.

The 10 of us under one roof is also the reason we probably won’t do this again. The grown-ups all want to do something different — hike, bike, fly-fish or find day spas. When you plan to go to dinner at 6:30, you’re always waiting for someone, always disappointing someone with the choice, always sitting through a too-long meal at an inappropriately named fast food joint where one of the little ones is freaking out, one or two adults are taking cell phone calls and everyone is bone-tired. It’s a biblical commandment that every child will have to go to the bathroom during the meal and at a different time from anyone else.