Bra-free, the way to be.

The real point of a midlife vacation

Deciding on a family holiday is tough. There are so many options. Do you want to:

• Relax on a beach in the majestic Outer Banks?

• Sip Aperol spritzes overlooking an ancient courtyard in beautiful Italy?

• Stay home and relax for a hot minute?

• Camp in a mobile tin can in the middle of winter with your children and spouse within arm’s reach 24h/7?

Because I like my hobbies to involve the maximum amount of work, I have chosen the latter. We are halfway into our two-week-long camper van trip on the South Island of New Zealand, where the scenery is beautiful, the people are friendly, and the children—my children— are feral:

I made this bingo card on the plane. If there were 5 squares with “sudden barfing,” I’d have had a Bingo! before we even got to our first stop.

Sure, this type of trip might sound insane to most, but I was drawn to it for many reasons, including escaping the North Carolina summer heat, escaping the news, and most importantly, escaping my bra.

Here’s the reality: if you go on vacation somewhere hot, the expectation is that you need to look cute. Sure, you might lean into caftans and flip-flops more than usual, but you’re not going to go out for a nice evening meal in Paris with your crispy hair sticking up like an old witch’s broom and your 40-year-old knockers flapping around. But if you’re camping, especially winter camping, the expectation is that you can and should resemble a hag that escaped from under a bridge in a Grimm’s fairy tale.

Or even better, Kate McKinnon’s Ms. Rafferty character from the SNL Close Encounters bit:

Her jeans are too tight for me but no way is she wearing a bra. Besides the freedom, it’s always a plus to make sure any aliens have easy access.

To me, that’s what a vacation is all about: looking as ugly as possible.

Ideally, I want to look so ugly that both children and adults run away when they see me coming.

Ditching any pretense of presentability helps me achieve my first goal, which is maximum laziness, while looking like a two legged rat helps me achieve the second, which is being left the fuck alone.

This is hands down my favorite children’s book: about an old lady who lives in a house with many children who just wants to be left the fuck alone so she can knit sweaters and drink tea. In the book, she finally escapes through a wormhole but I argue that being shockingly ugly is easier and more effective.

Unfortunately, this trick only works on strangers, as my children don’t seem to mind my decrepit appearance. They’re more than happy to cling to my legs and paw at my face while simultaneously pointing out that my bum is “ginormous” and my boobs are “deflated.” (A tip for parents of younger kids: you might think it’s cute to teach them vocabulary. Don’t.).

Of course, that’s the ultimate benefit of camping: most people are sad when their vacation ends. But if you go camping with young children, your real vacation starts when you get home and you can finally indulge in the most peaceful experience known to mankind: being locked in the bathroom alone with your phone.

However, despite all of camping’s many perks, it has not spared me from the ultimate vacation delusion, which is thinking I’ll have the luxury of ample free time when actually I have much less.

As I should have known, this trip has been much more about helping children put their fingers into the correct glove holes—a shockingly onerous task— and much less about putting pen to paper. Thus, in lieu of a real post, here is a collection of stories from our trip:

Day 1:

We’re on the road!

Within 5 minutes, the little one starts asking us if we’re there yet. No matter what answer we give, her only response is to scream “WHAT?! SERIOUSLY!?”

Within one hour, she starts telling us that we must not be reading the map right and that we are lost. She wants us to pull over so she can check. Also, we are not going fast enough.

Within two hours I realize: while the person in the backseat appears to be a five-year-old girl, she’s actually a boomer-acting, backseat-driving, chronically carsick mansplainer.

I’m annoyed. This was NOT in my camper van rental contract.

Day 2:

We go on a hike at the very top of the Southern Alps. Ice crystals make the fields look like a million glittering diamonds. The girls make ‘fairy wands’ out of frost-covered stalks. It’s perfectly serene—except for the bloodcurdling sound of the 5-year-old, who spends the entire hike back screaming “MY LEGS ARE BREAKING APART.”

I see a young Kiwi family turn around and run in the other direction.

Day 4:

The camper van has a toilet, which the girls have been using regularly since they have bladders the size of a walnut. I, on the other hand, have refrained from using it in favor of the campground restrooms, because I am sophisticated and because I am fond of checking out the funny campground signage, including this gem:

I haven’t seen this sign since my time gallivanting Southeast Asia. IYKYK.

Today, it’s pouring, so I break down and use our camper van bathroom. What I see:

A still-wrapped roll of toilet paper, untouched.

The girls have not been wiping this entire time.

It’s official: I have raised heathens.

Day 6:

We head to the National Kiwi Center, where we feed a tank of native longfin eels. They are, in technical terms, the world’s creepiest animals: with flat, slippery bodies, milky eyes, and gaping mouths, they look like six-foot-long tapeworms.

Longfin eel and/or me, on my way to the kitchen to raid the candy drawer after the kid’s bedtime. Photo cred here.

Female eels live in a lake or a river until they are about 70 years old, when they crawl over land to the ocean before swimming to Tonga, laying millions of eggs deep in the ocean, and then dying. The lady eels at the Kiwi Center had been rescued from a dredge pond in 1995. The Center employee told us that about once a year, they’d find one of the old ladies out of the tank, ready to migrate to Tonga after thirty years of captivity.

Afterwards, laying wide awake in the camper van listening to my family’s symphony of snores, I’m surprised to find that I can’t stop thinking about the eels. I keep imagining their wrinkled bodies, devoid of eggs, floating around the sea in silence.

Free.

And that’s when I realized I had officially lost my mind: when I developed eel envy.

Day 7:

It’s rainy AF. The girls are fighting and it’s not even 1pm when I tell them that they are “catastrophically annoying.” Paul is on the second phase of a cold and while he is handling it well, there are a lot of gurgling noises.

Worse, the camper van appears to have developed an echo such that each whine or hack is amplified like a hallway of mirrors for my ears.

As a result, I spend a considerable part of day’s drive thinking about how much money I could make if I could invent a pair of earbuds that could selectively noise cancel the sound of spousal snot sucking.

Replace the baby with a full-grown man and this would be my earpods ad. Imagine: an auditory life free of phlegm!

Still, things have been going better than on our last camper van trip, in Sweden and Norway, where a bad batch of pickled herring led to my husband’s now go-to brag, which is that he has shit himself in two countries in a single day.

Also, to add my own brag, the girls have managed to achieve the most underrated yet important childhood milestone: the ability to grab and use their own barf bags.

Of course, between all the bodily fluids and complaints, there is also a lot of joy, plenty of giggles, and the most epic scenery:

Which I enjoy as the good Lord intended: bra-free.

Before you go, I’d love to hear:

• Your best family vacation story- any fond misadventures?

• What’s your holiday style? Are you team ugly as sin or are you serving the lewks?

• Would you buy a pair of my phlegm-cancelling earbuds?