Ellen Byron

Hambones gotta hambone.

It’s sum-sum-summertime and you know what that means. Family vacays!

Growing up, that meant loading up the family station wagon and leaving at 2 or 3 a.m. (my favorite part of every trip) so we’d avoid traffic and start our trip with a full day of activities. I saw the sun rise over many East Coast states. In my family, summer vacation also meant trudging around historic sites from Maine to the Smokey Mountains. This led to photos of family members posing in stocks up and down the eastern seaboard. (Sadly, none of those photos seem to exist. My mother was notoriously terrible at documenting our adventures through photographs. When the three of us became adults, she shoved a manilla envelope filled with loose pictures into each of our hands. As my youngest brother acerbically pointed out, the envelopes got thinner with each kid.)

Me in front of various historic sites. Please don’t ask me where, although I’m pretty sure the last one is Williamsburg, VA.

As I exited my surly, emo teens, I became a fan of goofy travel pictures, as these pictures from late 1980s trips to Australia and New Zealand with my then-improv troupe prove. In the first picture, I’ve coerced fellow improvisors to pretend we’re the lost schoolgirls from the film, Picnic at Hanging Rock. In the second, I’m pretending to stoke the furnace of New Zealand steamship. Just call me Hammie Hammerson.

Much to the embarrassment of my family, I still love hamming it up on trips. Witness these images from the trip Jer and I just took to Gold Rush Country. Ostensibly the trip was purely business, a chance for me to research the region where my new Golden Motel Mystery series is set. But did that stop me from mugging for the camera? Not for a hot second…

I like to believe I’ll be hamming it up for the camera until I draw my last breath. It will mean I’ve kept my sense of humor until the end. And no matter how silly I get, I haven’t dressed up like an old-timey cowboy or saloon girl and taken pictures at a photo emporium.

At least, not yet.

Readers, what about you? Where did you go on family vacays? Any pictures of you in the stocks somewhere?

29 thoughts on “Hambones gotta hambone.”

  1. Growing up our family vacations were either going camping in Maine or going to WV to visit my grandmother and all of my Mom’s family. It was fun spending time with cousins that we only got to see every 2 years.

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  2. There are zillions of pics of our family vacays. Lots of camping, lots of hamming it up. (My grandpa’s nickname was Hambone, if that tells you anything!) Mostly we were mountain states travelers, but when I was in 4th grade, we drove from Wyoming to SoCal. I remember when we hit the LA freeways my mom said nervously, through pursed lips, “Put on your seatbelts.” We didn’t actually know how to do that. And my first plane ride was when I was a sophomore in hs, to visit my sister in Connecticut. My dad was a nervous flyer, but my younger sister, mom, and I were bouncing all around, enthralled with the flight while he gripped the armrests and stared stoically ahead. Good times!

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    1. Becky, why am I not surprised that you have a family member nicknamed “Hambone?!” OMG, this is funny. You really, really need to write a memoir someday. You have such hilarious stories from your childhood!

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  4. Love this, El! (That pic with your friends where you’re sticking out your tongue–is that me in the background, sitting cross-legged?) As pretty much an only child, I spent a lot of time in the backseat on endless road trips. Like you, mostly Eastern seaboard. The Skyline Drive seemed to go on forever, but I did get a stuffed bear on a leash in Gatlinburg. I got a lot of reading in, and my dad took a ton of photos (I have them all, mostly in slide form). To this day I cannot tolerate spearmint anything, because my mom gave me gum to deal with carsickness (I got over that quick). I do have an old-timey pic with my dad. It’s my favorite one of us. I am unsmiling, like the old-timey folks, my Brady Bunch-length kilt peeking out from my “gown.”

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    2. Lisa, we were in Gatlinburg too! I guess it was inevitable if you followed the Skyline Drive. And nope, not you. It was the girlfriend of the Australian guy I coerced into driving us to Hanging Rock. He had an enormous hangover the morning we were going but his girlfriend still made him drive us, for which I will be forever grateful.

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  5. Definitely a ham, here. My favorites are those cut-outs of people/animals/cactus/you-name-it with holes cut out for you to stick your heads in. There’s never been one I haven’t taken advantage of. (And I LOVE those “Picnic at Hanging Rock” photos SOOOO much!)

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  6. My family vacations were usually road trips, camping along the way, which meant we stayed in the Western US for them, getting up to Canada twice. Some very wonderful memories.

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    1. Mark, I bet! You were West Coast, I was East. But we never camped. My parents were both city kids born and raised. (Well, Italy for my mother originally.) Camping was not in either of their genes.

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  7. Ham it up, El! I have mostly serious (but smiling) pics. But sometimes I’ll do the above cut-outs, and I have been “behind bars” and in the stocks. For family vacay, we would usually go to the beach (even though I didn’t grow up close to the coast)–and my dad still prefers cooler climates!

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  8. Growing up, most of the time we went camping in the summer. Though, we did go to Disney World in 1975. No photos of any of us in stocks, but there are some of the family taken when we made a day trip from Orlando to the beach. These days, Nancy and I will take a selfie or two, but most of the time the scenery is a way better subject of a photo than us!

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  9. I have done the picture as a saloon gal and hubs as the sheriff — what’s wrong with that! Lol. I’m partial to the Petticoat Junction-style pic of you I the rain barrel! My mom has lots of sunburned pics of us as kids on the beach.

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    1. LOL, nothing is wrong with that when it’s you and the hubs – but me alone is… a little weird. And you two do the BEST Christmas cards. Right up my hammy alley! (And I mean that as a compliment.)

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  10. I can only remember two family vacations – one to Gettysburg and one to Boston. There are pictures of my brothers and sister in period dress…somewhere. Me, the “tool cool for school” teenager, refused to participate.

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  11. Fun post, Ellen! Already being in Maine, I didn’t vacation there. We hayed on the farm in the summer, and when it rained we took the day off to look at the ocean in the mist and eat tunafish sandwiches. We did get up at 4 am for hiking trips to New Hampshire’s White Mountains. So in most photos, we’re in front of a gray rocks at the shore or gray rocks on the mountain. Oh, and there’s a gray mist.

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    1. Paula, we were the tourists who annoyed you during the tuna salad breaks! And LOL re: all the gray. I get it. I remember a trip to Maine where it was cold the whole time. And all I wanted was one of the cool mini Adirondacks chair for my dolls.

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  12. My father was the district manager of four theatres in our hometown and another town in Texas in the lower Rio Grande Valley when I grew up. He got two weeks of vacation every year, but he was in the National Guard after serving in the Army in WWII and going to France and Germany and there went the two-week vacation. He had to do National Guard duty for those two weeks. It was after I got married that I ever went anywhere for vacation with my hubby and also my parents. My parents and I traveled extensively through Mexico as did my husband and I to some extent. But my Hubby and I went to many places and lots of photos and memories.

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  13. This is awesome–and awesome timing! I’m on a family vacay right this very second. It’s me and four teenagers. What could possibly go wrong?

    I’m terrrrrrrrrible at remembering to take pictures BUT I do have an old-timey photo of me when I was about 10 years old. It’s proudly hanging in the bathroom at my dad’s house.

    Can’t wait for the new series! ❤

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