I Went Away With My Kids And Thank God We Didn't Bond

I have taken “guy trips” that have included stops in: Vegas, New Orleans, Myrtle Beach, Virginia Beach, Chicago and Baltimore.  I can assure you they all included copious amounts of alcohol and activity that was borderline hedonistic.  I usually came home exhausted and broke.  One time I came home without a driver’s license and credit card and a very bad limp.  (That was the New Orleans trip and I am still trying to put together the timeline on that one.)

These trips were memorable and epic.

When I mentioned to my wife that I wanted to take another “guy trip” with my two boys, my wife did everything but make a hotel reservation for me amid proclamations that sounded a lot like, “They won’t be young forever.”  (Or it could have been, “You won’t be young forever.”)

Dylan, Chris and I Being Awesome

A week later, Dylan, Chris and I were in my car heading across Pennsylvania Route 6 toward Wellsboro, PA, an area known as the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon.  We were going to spend three days in the 

mountains hiking and biking and basically guying it up. 

It would be easy to be nostalgic about a trip like this and wax on about father/son bonding.  But really, there was none of that.  That’s right.  We did not bond.  At all.

Bonding can be defined as “join or to be joined securely to something else.”   Well, we really didn’t need joined.  I found out we are joined.

We hiked the gorges and rode bikes along the trail next to Pine Creek.  We had lunch on picnic tables with not a soul in sight.  We ate Italian two nights in a row.  We did a little swimming and I caught up on some reading.  We argued about whether or not the bird we saw was an eagle (it was) and we did some ball-

busting – which is an awesome guy thing to do.  We just had fun.

So we didn’t “bond.”  For me this trip was validation.  It was validation that I have two awesome kids who are well adjusted and can laugh at themselves (when not laughing at each other).  It was validation that we (though they would never admit such a thing) get along pretty well.  It was validation that trips don’t have to end with a limp and a call to your credit card company to prove you had one hell of a great time.  And it was validation that, thankfully, we didn’t need to bond.