Family on Safari

Travel Stories: How would Grandma have felt about the bumpy Tanzanian roads? She would've hated them. And those pit toilets? Ditto. Frank Bures explores the family vacation minus one.

11.22.02 | 10:52 PM ET

Photo by Frank Bures.

Our Land Rover had just hit another rock on the Rift Valley floor when my mom grabbed her neck and yelled from the back seat.

“Grandma wouldn’t have liked this road!”

It was true. Grandma wouldn’t have liked the road one bit. On that we all agreed. As the family safari unfolded, this kind of comment was becoming more and more common. In fact, registering how Grandma would have felt about this or that thing was becoming the theme of the entire trip to Tanzania.

Before they had left, there had been some heated discussion over whether Grandma, at 83 and still in good health, should have accompanied my parents and two brothers, Bob and Joey, to visit me where I was teaching English.

In all my life, Grandma had come along on nearly every family vacation. When I was riding on Dad’s shoulders at a castle in Ireland, and cracked my head on a low doorway, Grandma was there. When Joe’s milk jug full of urine (to minimize stops) spilled all over our van in Utah, Grandma was there. When Dad gunned the car up an icy Minnesota hill and ended with us hanging off a cliff, Grandma was there. When I was confused by the humping animals at Bear Country USA, Grandma just chuckled and, in her most bemused, understated way, said, “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”

Grandma had seen us at our worst, and our best. She had watched us fight and helped us make up. She had shepherded us through the maze of each adventure. She was the rock on which we all stood. Her calming presence and humor kept us from each others’ throats.

Now, for the first time, we were swimming alone. Grandma was back in Minnesota, probably doing a crossword puzzle, or reading a library book, or drinking last week’s warmed-over coffee, while we were out in the world, heading deep into the heart of darkness—the family vacation—without her.

In the end we had decided Africa would be too hard, with too much walking and jolting and diarrhea. We couldn’t just drag Grandma along to play referee. So she lived through us.

Our feelings became Grandma’s feelings.

We raced to stay ahead of the billowing dust kicked up by our tires.

“She wouldn’t have liked this dust,” said Bob, in back. Dust was coating everything in the Land Rover. The hills on the far side of the valley still seemed a long way off.

“She definitely wouldn’t have liked those bathrooms,” said Mom.

“Look,” said Elias, our driver. “Lake Manyara. With the flamingos.”

On the far edge of the Rift Valley, we could see a mirage, a shimmering pinkish-white sliver, with hills rising up behind it.

Grandma would have liked flamingos.