To mark the beginning of summer vacation, we recently packed up the family and took off on a road trip for a long weekend. While we had a good time, I still harbored a little bit of anxiety about unexpected and unspecified car problems stranding us 20 miles outside of Oakdale or another middle-of-nowhere type place. I never thought about this kind of thing before we had kids. When I was in college I routinely took my elderly '71 Volvo "Berkeley Bomber" up to Tahoe, the Mother Lode, or the Central Coast, and more recently (but still before children), we took my fun-to-drive but overly complicated Alfa Romeo GTV-6 to such far flung spots as Mendocino and Bend, Oregon without a worry.

Of course there were occasionaly problems, such as having the water pump on the Alfa go the moment we returned from that Mendocino trip (good timing, actually!), and the time on yet another trip to the Mendocino coast when my wife's Mazda RX-7, which was previously the most reliable car that either of us owned before we were married, decided to come down with a blocked radiator on a 102º day somewhere between Cloverdale and Boonville. In both cases, no lasting harm was done to either machine or occupant, and we chalked it up to experience.

Having small people in the car who you're responsible for changes all that. While the trip to Columbia or Disneyland or wherever was uneventful, the "what if" factor still exists, especially if your car no longer has that handy roadside assistance that you never had to use (funny how that works). Ultimately, we made it back home in one piece, and I decided that I was probably over-analyzing things, as I am prone to doing. But I also got to thinking about family road trips in years past, and if we had any total disasters back when I was young.

Everyone has to have one vacation that didn't go so smoothly. Not necessarily a Griswold family National Lampoon's Vacation-style disaster (the original Vacation is still the gold standard in family road trip movies), but a trip where things happened that weren't so amusing at the time but are now looked back as being either funny or exciting.

I can remember going on numerous road trips as a kid. The North Coast, Oregon, Disneyland, Tahoe—no problems there. We tended to have troubles somewhere where there were extra complications. Like that time the keys got locked in our rental car somewhere out in the middle of nowhere in Hawaii... on Maui, I think. Of course my father blamed my mother and vice versa, and instead of trying to figure out how to get the keys out of the car a nice family fight ensued. Fun! Eventually, access was acquired through the back seats from the trunk. Or maybe it was from the back seats into the trunk where the keys were locked. It doesn't matter, as we eventually got the keys and got out of wherever we were.

Then there was the Austrian trip. Let me digress a little by pointing out that we grew up only a couple rungs on the evolutionary ladder above poor white trash. Okay, maybe it wasn't that bad, but we weren't rich. We did, however, have a dad who worked for the airlines, which meant that back in the day we would often get inexpensive or even free passes on other carriers. So we took advantage of the situation and took a lot of "on the cheap" overseas vacations. Usually, followed the same tactics for each trip: rent a house in an interested, central area; rent a car; go out on day trips, then come home and fix dinner and crash; repeat until it was time to go home.

For some reason, on this trip we didn't have those kinds of plans. Instead, we rented a car at Munich airport, piled in, and headed south. We stopped in some small town to find lodging, and after checking out the first place that we found, returned to the car to reconsider. An unexpected hissing sound brought our attention to the fact that one of the tires had a big fat nail stuck in it, so guess where we stayed that night? All in all, it turned out to be a pretty decent little "Zimmer frei" kind of place, but getting forced into it via a flat tire is no fun. But that's not the near-disaster.

So near the end of the trip, for some reason, we found ourselves cruising around the Salzkammergut lake district later into the evening than we had planned. To this day I'm not sure why we didn't just check into a hotel, but we didn't. We drove from village to village, looking for the familiar "Zimmer frei" sign signifying B&B-type rooms available (usually common in private homes in just about every town and village) and not finding any. Finally, it was about 9 or 10 at night and my father decides "We're going to sleep in the car!"

So we pull our rented Opel Kadett—not the roomiest of vehicles, mind you—off to the side of the road, bundle up in our jackets, and try to lean back and go to sleep. In hindsight, this was definitely one of those "what were they thinking" moments, but at the time it seemed to make sense, in sort of an adventurous kind of way, especially if you're an impressionable kid. We all tried valiantly to get some sleep, but the discomfort of trying to sleep in the car with three other people (no lying down across the back seat) coupled with the fact that a storm was blowing in from somewhere made this impossible. The storm got stronger and more powerful. We could hear the rain hitting the roof and windows of the Kadett and the accompanying strong winds blew the little car from side to side.

Eventually, someone got smart, and we fired up the car and headed into the nearest town and ran into the first hotel we saw. I even remember the name: Seehotel Schlick. We got our rooms. My brother and I trudged off to ours and crawled into bed at whatever ungodly hour it was, where we both slept like logs. In the morning we awoke to silence—the storm had stopped. I walked to the window of our room and opened the drapes to be greeted by an expanse of white covering the houses, roads, and previously bright green spring grass. It had snowed during the night. I'm not sure if we would have all frozen to death in our little rental car. It would have made for a slightly amusing newspaper headline, if it had actually happened.

That's it. That's the disaster. Not much of one at all, when you think back on it, although I don't advise deciding to have your family sleep in a car in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country. And don't be cheap; just suck it up and get that hotel room.