Travels with My Family

Instead of dream vacations to Disney World and motels with swimming pools and water slides, the parents in Travels with My Family insist on obscure destinations even if it means driving for hours to get to the middle of nowhere, countless back-seat games of Twenty Questions that end badly, and reading aloud the How to Change a Tire” chapter from the Owner’s Manual. To say nothing of what happens when they arrive: eating grasshoppers in Mexico, forgetting the tide schedule while collecting sand dollars off the coast of Georgia, and mistaking alligators for logs in the middle of Okefenokee Swamp. Husband-and-wife team David Homel and Marie-Louise Gay have combined their writing and illustrating talents with their own family memories to produce a very different kind of travelogue. Travels with My Family is told from the point of view of a long-suffering big brother who must fulfill many roles in this eccentric family keep little brother out of trouble; humor artist Mom while she seeks out beauty and inspiration in the least likely places; and discourage nearsighted, tone-deaf Dad from pulling out the road map to search for yet another strange destination.