Recently, a friend texted me “Just reached Anaheim. It’s flooded all over. My five-year-old will be so disappointed.”
I replied “You will all remember this for the rest of your lives. After all, isn’t that what holidays are about? Everlasting memories—good or bad.”
It may have sounded flippant, but there was a hard nugget of truth within.
Many moons ago, I had lost our home and possessions through foreclosure and near bankruptcy. My two boys were then one year and two years old.
From their age of five, my whole family wistfully reminded me of how wonderful it would be to visit Disneyland. Refusing to go bankrupt, with no prospects in sight, all I could think of was having us collect empty bottles and save the change. Everywhere we went, Christopher, the younger would carry a plastic Safeway bag, whizzing from one garbage bin to another collecting what he could, much to the embarrassment of his mother.
By the time my elder son had reached the age of eleven, we had collected nearly $4,000 to make this trip.
We chose summer as we would have plenty of time to reach our destination. We couldn’t afford airfare and banked on driving from Calgary to Disneyland, slumming it in the cheapest motels we could find along the way.
One night, the inevitable happened. There was no room to be found anywhere.
Having lost my way, we had arrived in Eureka, California around 9 p.m. There was an all-US junior high school annual basketball tournament that weekend. Because of my wrong turn somewhere, we hadn’t eaten since the afternoon. One after the other we were buffeted from one motel to another, going down in scale and safety each time.
Eventually we ended up at the Palomino. It was a Spanish style 8-apartment house, with an open-air parking space underneath the suites. On the outside, the walls were white stuccoed and stippled. So filthy were they—all we could see was a yellowish-brown exterior.
There was only one room left, at the exorbitant price of US $20.
As we opened it, our door stuck in the jungle of bright green, wall-to-wall shag carpeting. We encountered cockroaches in the kitchen sink and spiders on the walls, which were filthier than even the exterior.
It was near 10 p.m. We had to feed the kids.
The caretaker/receptionist pointed out a Jamaican restaurant that we could walk to. Each step was a terrifying exercise of looking over our shoulders to make sure no one was following, to rob us. We entered a dark den populated with Latinos and made the mistake of asking for a menu. “Jerk chicken and rice with peas. $10,” came the swift reply.
Whether it was hunger or fright, the boys ate their food with gusto. Though hesitant at first, their parents gobbled down the only nourishing meal of the day.
We blew all our money in two days at Disneyland and barely reached home with a dollar in hand. But at least, as parents, we had done our duty.
Never once was Disneyland ever mentioned by the boys.
When asked by their school friends or anyone else “Where did you go on holiday?” They instantly answered “EUREKA!!!”
