“You cannot recreate the past, but you can find your own path to the future.”

I grew up in a big family. My father had three siblings, just like my mother. Although my parents divorced when I was a toddler, our childhood vacations cast a wide net. We included cousins and grandparents. I shared rooms with my siblings. Laughter. Long meals. Teenage antics. All of this was part of the magic that I had envisioned passing down to my kids.

But when I was 30, my father died, and–for a while–my family stopped taking vacations. When my sons were born, in the aftermath of that colossal loss, I wondered if we would ever be able to replicate the type of travel I had enjoyed as a kid, that messy, frenetic, family travel: too many plates on a table; long waits at restaurants, with bodies jumbled together; virgin piña coladas by some indistinct pool. And the joy; captured in grainy photographs. Faded pink and purple bathing suits, rafts in some faraway ocean, my aunt telling me how I always plunged my face into the sand, my father tossing me into the ocean as a wave was cresting, the long days, the backlit pools that were available to kids all the time. Could we ever give our kids these big, courageous memories?

We could. We would. You cannot recreate the past, but you can find your own path to the future. After the pandemic forced a second separation upon us, my family and I resolved to see more of one another. At Eden Roc at Cap Cana, we took over the Imperiale Villa, spilling into the pool, driving golf carts the way we once had during a family vacation in Jamaica, back when my cousins and I were just old enough to drive.

I don’t believe in spirits, but I believe in fate. Something in me also believes that every time my sisters dove into the sea with my sons—that every time the sun turned creamy pink and sherbet orange in the corner of the sky after a day lounging with books in the dayglow of a new-to-us island— my father was somewhere, making his ethereal presence known.

Eden Roc is not the whole story. I’d be leaving out half of my family if I ended it there. There was also my mother, the other half of my kids’ grandparental legacy. All families are built differently, and mine had been a tree that had grown in all kinds of directions. In November, my mother and I resolved to recreate one of our own trips from my youth. In the late 1980s, she and my aunt booked a resolutely American tour: trips through the National Parks with me and my cousin, Peter, driving from Colorado through Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nevada in a rented Plymouth Voyager minivan.

We were seeing a version of America that I had never known from my East Coast life: prairie dogs and the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest; Old Faithful and the antler arches of Jackson Hole; the red and dripping hoodoos of Bryce Canyon, unique rock formations that reach toward the seemingly endless Utahan sky.

Back then, in an era before cell phones and the Internet, we found solace in the Sizzlers of the Southwest, where my mom and aunt commiserated over salad bars and where my cousin and I commiserated over shared secrets. My sunglasses, purchased at a trading post somewhere between Wyoming and Arizona, had snapped in the back of the van, and it remained our own story, a history between kids and kept from parents. That’s the kind of thing you remember when you’re on the road forever, making games of license plates and watching the land turn from flat to vertical.

America spread out before us; it was vast and endless. We didn’t know that our family would flex and expand, too. That my mother would remarry and have two more children. That Peter would eventually marry, and have two daughters. That I would also marry and have two sons. No, back then, it was just us and the road and the trading posts full of beaded moccasins and silver and turquoise, and the swirling colors in the hot springs at Old Faithful, and the bison and occasional moose, and the sense that the black sky full of constellations was as wide and free as anything still before us.

I carried with me a million memories from that summer road trip: eating bumbleberry pie at a diner in Utah; meeting a Navajo pottery artisan outside of Santa Fe; driving the lip of the Grand Canyon, from one rim to the next. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought, in the thick of it, how formative those two weeks on the road could have been, but it stuck with me. That’s the way of family trips. They become a part of you. In a way, they are you—all the squabbles and tensions, the discomfort and salad bar dinners at some far-flung Sizzler, the jokes that never stop being funny, even well into adulthood.

You could be sitting in a pool in the Dominican, riding Space Mountain (as my mother and I did on a recent trip with my own kids), or speeding through the Painted Desert. Either way, you’re cementing one fundamental thing: these are your people, and they always will be. Nothing can change it. Nothing can erase it.

The moments that make multi-generational travel special are subtle, and they are what I hold on to and what I take note of as I plan these trips now, in the golden age of my own parenting. Some of them I was still excavating long after they’d taken place: hidden jokes that had entered our common familial language; memories now inextricable; touchstones that will forever connect us, drawing us back in time.

Just as I remember times spent with my cousins, my late grandmother, my late father, so, too, will my children remember times spent with their aunts and grandparents, priceless time capsules that are better than any other vacation souvenir I could reasonably offer. We went here. We did this. We had this funny memory, this beautiful memory, this sad or strange or silly memory, all yours to keep, all yours, for now, forever. It remains the best I can ever do, both in travel and in parenting. And maybe that is enough.