Commentary: Travels with my unit

Garth Goodwin

Abstract: This article resulted from a challenge of a colleague to write about a recent travel experience with young people. In the hope of inspiring others to push beyond the walls of their unit, it became a primer on travel with young people, a process still underway as the summer of 1998 approaches. Happy Trails.

Many residential treatment units or group homes plan some form of holiday period on an annual basis. Some have the luxury of their own recreational property to use, while others have to turn to the community for facilities such as campgrounds, cabins, or hotels. The norm seems to be to have a week away and to create a holiday experience. Over my career, I have enjoyed the privilege and the agony of all of these forms of holidaying, but taking a road trip stands out as the most rewarding and most challenging. The purpose of this article will be to explore travel with unit residents, drawing upon my experiences and covering purpose, planning, funding, and results.

Why travel? The straightforward answer would be “to broaden one’s experience.” Youth in care can derive the same rewards of learning, confidence building, enjoyment, and transformation that anyone does through travel. But it is not for everyone and the rewards are not that immediate, especially for young people who often by their very nature shy away from welcoming and giving themselves over to new and strange experiences. Most practitioners who have taken their young people away for a period soon experience the anxiety it stirs up, the sudden and sometimes profound sense of missing home and the constant questions along the way. Road trips are best approached in stages with a stable and long-term population of young people who have the advantage of knowing each other well. Short, single-night trips that turn out fine and lead to longer periods away soon build the confidence of young people to look forward to even longer travel experiences.

Planning is central to the whole enterprise being a success. One of our more enduring shared cultural traits has been the stress of going on the family holiday. With a residential unit, this stress is often magnified several times over as all share in the anxiety of leaving home and family and being together for however many days the trip takes. It is essential to have a shared purpose, one that the majority supports or can buy into. For the most recent trip, this was the midway at the Mall of America. This was a guaranteed, sure-fire winner with the young people.

Still, it is not enough. In the same way a travel or tour company outlines an itinerary, it is necessary to have one for each day: each morning, afternoon, and evening of the trip. These young people are used to shift transitions, and, while the individuals rarely change on a trip, the routine segments of the day can be replicated on an itinerary.

Detail is important. Not only the necessary detail of what, where, and when but as much as can be brought into the experience as possible. Make a point to take the group to the local provincial tourist office to pick up additional materials and sign the guest book. On our trip, a highlighter was used to mark off on the map how far we had gone and had to go for each drive. This does much to end the “Are we there, yets?” and can be easily flashed at each stage of the drive.

Allow the young people to bring familiar and favoured things: stuffies, a walkman, their favourite outfits; all packed in their own bag to keep track of. It eases the loss of home by giving them more of their own to relate to in strange places.

Each event, the hotel, and the locations were all listed in a briefing book for the trip, which was read by all before and during the trip. The briefing book also outlined the expectations for conduct regarding going to a foreign country, staying in a hotel, and setting meeting times and places. Such a book can be a life-saver, an anchor to refer to when things become a little fuzzy, as they almost always do and often several times a day. Lists are paramount, and more important is someone familiar with them and acutely observant. Arriving to find you are missing the essentials like food and toothbrushes can take you aback and send you scurrying about to make up the loss. No one needs that. Be prepared for this, for something will always be forgotten.

In many ways, your actual planning will be totally dependent upon your funding. Some facilities fund travel as part of their programs, yet I believe it is not the norm. For many of the trips I have enjoyed, aggressive fundraising has been the way to finance the experience. The drawback of this is that the fundraising effort can come to dominate the program, especially if it is a grand amount. Saving from existing recreational funds and supplementing these with casual yet persistent fundraising can soon afford a determined group of people the means to follow their dream. Along the way, the group learns to share in the experience, savour it, and prepare for it in measured steps as one would with any goal. Once you have a budget, planning re-enters the picture along with ingenuity and legwork to get the best value for your dollar. If you have significant lead time, you can write the tourism offices at your destination for information and make inquiries at hotel chains. The Internet is the perfect planning tool, offering detail right down to the anticipated weather forecasts. Many hotel chains welcome kids under eighteen, and a few do so for reasonable rates. Connecting rooms make it possible to house a van-sized group with ease. Road lunches, snack items, and small appliances can go a long way toward avoiding the restaurant scene for each and every meal. Discounts abound for families, and those with courtesy cards can find them for a group. Allowable expenses from existing travel, clothing, and recreational budget lines can also be applied to road travel with permission. In the end, it really is a case of where there is a will, there is a way.

A note on “will” would be in order. This kind of experience is above and beyond the usual job description or shifting pattern for most Child and Youth Care workers. Shift patterns can be compensated for in some cases. Sometimes, it is simply all on your own time. Certainly the funding/planning phases often involve volunteer time, effort, and sacrifice. From taking the decision to unpacking the van at the end, the Child and Youth Care practitioner and the young person share an experience beyond the usual. Commitment and dedication are essential to a successful journey together, and it is not forgotten. In fact, in the end, the effort put into the experience becomes its most immediate reward. The usual routines and patterns are broken and replaced by constant attention and togetherness. Young people remember this especially. Still, it almost invariably happens that one hears, “I didn’t want to come on this dumb trip anyway; let’s go home” or suffers through a total tantrum as someone adjusts to the experience. These must be attended to sincerely yet viewed as bumps along the road. In some ways, it is almost a test of one’s resolve: usually delivered when you least need it, but delivered anyway.

The real rewards often come later. You find you are closer to those young people you shared the road with. Months later, you may be sitting around and a little recollection from the trip will stream out, often with substantial appreciation. If someone asks about highlights of living there, the trips will often be at the forefront. Sometimes, if you hang in there for twenty-odd years, you will have young people approach you now as adults to tell you: “I take my kids there every year"; “We went there for the weekend"; “You remember the time ...” At some level, and especially for some people, the experience of travel sticks and they pass it on to their kids. This has happened for me several times over- usually about those times I was knocking myself out to help some younger person realize a dream, be it a trip, a baseball season, or the school play- and I am reminded it is not enough to simply do one’s shift but to truly step outside the expected and share in some real growth.

This feature: Goodwin, Garth. (1998). Commentary: Travels with my unit. Journal of Child and Youth Care, 12, 3. pp. 83-85.