Traveling with teenagers is entirely different than hitting the road with smaller children.
When you’re on the road with kids, all they care about is one thing.
“Is there a pool? Is there a pool? Is there a pool?” If you answer that question in the affirmative, nothing else matters involving the entire trip, except maybe the length of time they’ll have to be in the car.
Now, traveling anywhere with children is not for sissies. But things are completely different with teenagers, who often don’t even care much whether there’s a pool, unless there are other teenagers crowded around it, in which case it becomes like catnip to a Siamese.
Little kids care about two things: Swimming and snacks.
Though they wouldn’t mind if puppies were somehow involved as well. (Seriously. I went through an ordeal of epic proportions to take them to pet gray whale calves in Baja, and afterward all they remembered were the puppies at the hotel.)
Teenagers have more important things on their mind, though, including the availability of wi-fi at the destination, whether their phones will have service, whether their phones will have service and whether their phones will have service.
Did I mention that they always want to know if their phones will have service?
I have actually heard my kids discussing this in the back seat while I drive to a national park. Instead of enjoying the stunning mountain scenery passing outside their windows, they are watching their phones instead.
“I have two bars. How many do you have?”
“I have three bars. Do you have three bars?”
This can go on for quite awhile, until I change the radio station, at which point they suddenly look up, realize they are in a national park, and then comment on their surroundings.
“Why did you change the radio station? We don’t want to listen to that awful country music,” they take the time to share with me, before going back to pondering their phone reception.
That’s one advantage of taking them completely out of the country, like our recent brief escape last week down to Rosarito Beach in Baja California, Mexico.
Before we even packed the car, the teens had steeled themselves to endure an agonizing interlude without wireless communication with everyone they’d ever met, and more people they didn’t even know.
They realized this was the painful price of living with a travel writer, that they would occasionally be forced to lose touch with far-off friends for entire hours at a time.
They might not know that Madison just broke up with Justin, or that Ashley, who was in their 11th-grade class in high school but moved to Lake Elsinore last year, just ran away from home.
They might be unaware that Drake just dropped a new song or that a Kardashian sister posed naked on Twitter.
Well, they would know that, because it’s the Kardashians. They’re ubiquitous. Like cockroaches.
I’m happy to say that my two wonderful teenagers, whom I adore, were able to have full phone reception until we crossed the border at San Diego into Tijuana, and got onto the scenic toll road to Rosarito, enabling them to announce on Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat that they were leaving the country, so everyone could go burglarize our house.
(Fortunately, I’d hired a live-in dogsitter, so any burglars would have encountered Buddy the Wonder Dog, who would have licked them to death and our Generic White Dog, Lil Wayne, who would have barked mercilessly until they fled with bleeding eardrums.)
After crossing the border, the nightmare began for my beloved teenagers, as they were imprisoned incommunicado in the back seat, but look at the sun glinting on the ocean outside the window, and talk to each other for the entire 20 miles it took to get to the Rosarito Beach Hotel.
After we arrived at this historic old neo-Colonial hotel and checked into our room, the long nightmare ended, because the teens discovered the hotel had just the day before upgraded its wi-fi to reach the room.
I was insistent they actually look out the window at the ocean before turning back to their phones, and Curly Girl agreed to go on a horseback ride on the beach.
My friend, Kim, who was visiting from Georgia, and I went and had a massage at the lovely tiled spa, while the teens explored the hotel.
There were not one but three pools, but the teens weren’t interested. Cheetah Boy was excited that he’s old enough at 19 to drink in Mexico, so he had a beer and promptly fell asleep. That’s what happens when you drink Corona instead of the correct beer, which is Pacifico.
Over the next 20 hours, we drank many margaritas, ate food that definitely was not on my diet, went shopping for Mexican souvenirs and walked on the beach.
It was a lovely family time, despite the wi-fi, and I realized later that I didn’t buy enough earrings. Nor did I get to eat any lobster. Plus, there was tequila still available for purchase.
So I guess I’ll have to plan a return trip soon.
Meanwhile, we‘re looking at the possibility of a couple of days in Big Bear. I don’t think I can buy any earrings there, but I’m willing to bet I can get some fish.
Contact the writer: mfisher@ocregister.com or 714-796-7994
