It’s that time of year, when families hit the road and visit their favorite places. I’ve seen Facebook updates from my friends visiting Delaware, Las Vegas, Bryce Canyon, Santa Fe … and now it’s our turn.

When I was a kid, our family had one favorite place to go—a resort in Oregon with bike trails, canoe rides, white water rafting and hiking. Some of my earliest memories come from this place: the spiral staircase in the first house we rented, the log pile I sat on when I decided to count to 100 for the first time, the vague weirdness of the Sunshine Hydrox cookies we ate because the store didn’t carry normal Oreos.

We didn’t get to come here every year when I was growing up, but we would’ve. Happily. Over time, the place got big enough that they built a school and several churches, and I thought more than once about what it would be like to live here year round.

I think everyone probably has that fantasy. What would it be like to leave your regular life and live in the place that feels like heaven?

It’s been 24 years since my extended family visited this spot together, and 21 since our last family vacation. It’s been a year since we nearly lost my dad in a terrible accident. So, to celebrate his 80th birthday and the amazing fact that he’s still here with us, we decided to come once again to our favorite spot.

This time, some things are different. Instead of the original eight of us, we are now twenty-nine.

So obviously, we no longer fit inside my parents’ van. (It’s the one I picked out in Kindergarten and drove when I was in high school, and it was outlasted only by the shag carpet in their living room.)

We also are experiencing somewhat less hunger to do things like white-water rafting. Rapids that seem totally wicked when you’re thirteen seem like a really bad idea when you’re traveling with infants.

But otherwise, the place is pretty much the way we left it. Same airy pines, same dusty tan soil, same heat rising up from it, coating our skin in salt and sweat. And the ride here was every bit as long as I remembered.

We drove down with the girls on Saturday morning, and twenty-minutes into the seven-hour drive, Alice asked, “Are we there yet?”

We have a standard answer to that question. “Are we moving? If so, we’re not there yet.”

I popped in an audio book of Hate That Cat by Sharon Creech, the follow-up to Hate That Dog, which I’d read to them the week before when Adam was on a business trip. Both kids sobbed and had to sleep in my bed. So it was a bit of a risk checking one the sequel, but it paid off. The girls giggled for the better part of an hour, and Lucy concluded that hate has more comic possibilities than love.

Still, we got the “Are We There Yet” question many times more.

We got it as we were driving through a vault of Douglas fir trees so green you’d wonder why anyone cared about emeralds. We got it as we wound our way up narrow roads that curved past majestic rocky gorges.

We got it when we were driving through a high desert of reddish soil and sage that turned its pale green arms to curving blue sky. And we got it as we passed basalt columns that rose out of the soil like a crowd of curious gods.

Are we there yet?

Adam kept telling the kids to look out the window, so that they would be suitably amazed by what they saw. He told them how he’d once traveled that road with an old British guy who used to do the album art for his favorite progressive-rock band. The artist kept having to stop and photograph the very landscape we were passing, because it was so foreign to what he’d seen anywhere else on the earth.

And yet all the kids wanted to know is, Are we there yet?

I can’t say I blame them. For all I remember the bike trails and the canoe trips and the mosquito bites and the fun of our favorite spot, all I remembered about getting there was that it took a terribly long time. I didn’t remember any of this jaw-dropping beauty. I just wanted the drive to be behind us.

In a way, I think this is the truth of childhood. When almost everything is new to you, beautiful scenery doesn’t stand out any more than a strip-mall card shop that happens to carry your favorite erasers.

Or maybe it’s a truth about life in general.

By the time you’re old enough not to mind the trip, you’re old enough to realize that the trip is what it’s all about. Whenever you’re with the people you love the most, wherever you are, that’s the best spot in the world—who’d trade that for anything?