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Nostalgia: Summer Vacations

If you’re of a certain age, you surely remember packing into the back of the family truckster — sans seat belts, car or booster seats, and most likely common sense, of course — and driving with mom, dad and your siblings to a far-away destination for that long-awaited family vacation.

If you were lucky enough, or you were the oldest, you even got to sit in the back — the cargo area behind the back seat where you could stretch out and pass the time away during a long drive.

For many, vacations today are all about the experience of going to a new, exotic beach, or traveling to another country to learn its culture. But in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, for most of us family vacations were as simple as a trip to a local lake, a regional amusement attraction or to a state or national park for a couple days of hanging out in the woods. And vacations usually involved the “extended” family — aunts, uncles, cousins and maybe grandma and grandpa. A youngster who was allowed to bring an actual friend on vacation to deal with the stress of being around 20 other people was lucky, indeed.

The idyllic family vacation is what we’re showcasing inside today in our third installment of “Nostalgia.” The publication, which comes out every other month, focuses on how life was lived from the 1950s through the 1970s. Our first edition focused on the shows we watched, while the second edition studied the muscle-car era. This one, obviously, focuses on family vacations.

Executive Editor Mike Myer writes about his time in the woods, and how his father liked to pack up the car after coming home from work and start driving, with Myer waking up in destinations such as Washington, D.C., where they would spend the day before heading home again.

Reporter Joselyn King spent her vacations camping at Paw Paw, West Virginia, with her family. And the stories go on and on.

We invite you to pull out your old family vacation pictures, sit back with this copy of “Nostalgia” and reminisce with us as we look back on the great memories of our family vacations.

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