Escaping Conventional Vacations
Last week, my family and I drove to New Orleans for our spring break. We planned our vacation by highlighting the popular tourist spots, suggesting that each member of the family provide a top two must-see list. My parents likely expected the list to include experiences we could only have in New Orleans — my mother’s suggestions were a plantation visit and a swamp tour, and she provided guidebooks for everyone to select their own stops. I followed suit, adding the World War II museum and the art museum to the list. But when my younger brother mentioned his top two, he led us to reconsider just what “tourism” meant.
My brother tried his first escape room a few months ago at a friend’s birthday party. My sister had experienced one before, too, but my parents and I had never ventured to try it. So when my brother looked through pamphlets at our hotel and found one that advertised the number-one escape room company in the nation, he announced that he had chosen his top must-see item.
“I want to do the escape room.”
At first, my mother suggested that he look through some other options — there was an escape room group in Austin, and there were so many other options that were exclusive to our destination. But after more encouragement from both of my siblings, she acquiesced: we would try the escape room together.
I didn’t realize until we were locked into separate prison cells, working together to break out of the room, that I had romanticized the concept of tourism. My parents and I had grown attached to the concept of exploring the city that we had not considered the value of doing something fun for its own sake, of trying something that wasn’t site-specific. As we worked through the escape room, we connected more than we had at any other point in the trip because we were working together to solve the puzzle. We had loved visiting the museums and local sites, but this experience forced us to spend fifty-nine-and-a-half minutes focusing on leveraging each other’s strengths toward a common goal.
I still enjoyed the other places we visited — the art museum was as appealing as we expected, and the World War II museum surpassed all of our expectations — but following my brother’s suggestion led to a memory that will likely remain more vivid than the others. Life’s experiences fuel our memories, but the people within them add pigment to monochrome locations. We remember the inside jokes, the unexpected encounters, and the interactions within their environments, whether or not they fit the conventional concepts of tourism.