More than a decade after becoming parents, my wife and I decided recently it was finally time for our first family vacation. We did extensive research before deciding on a destination for our brood, which consists of an 11-year-old, a 9-year-old, a 6-year-old, a youngish mother and a young-at-heart father.

Since April vacation fell during April this year, anywhere north was deemed out of bounds. We also nixed any place that required flight, since the cost of five airline tickets would have come dangerously close to wiping out our vacation funds before we even got the chance to start vacating.

Ultimately, we settled on Washington, D.C. as the best place to build childhood memories for our offspring. We figured the Young ”˜uns would both enjoy themselves and learn a few things in the nation’s capital, and that there’d be plenty of activities for their parental unit/tour guides as well. After securing babysitters for the homebound members of our extended family (a pair of guinea pigs and two fish), we headed south on a sunny Friday morning.

Extensive (pre-fatherhood) past experience taught me that driving 580 miles should take about 10 hours, including stops. However, those long-ago junkets didn’t involve traveling with people whose bladders were the size of raisins, or with those who insist they don’t need to use the potty, only to begin moaning 30 seconds after passing a highway rest area that, “I gotta go NOW!” It took better than nine hours to arrive a mere 394 miles from home to central New Jersey, where we stayed the night with some exceptionally tolerant relatives before continuing on to Washington the next day.

So how do parents stay sane on a day-long drive with three elementary school-aged kids, assuming they don’t wish to risk permanent brain damage to their offspring by allowing them to become mesmerized by electronic instruments of the devil disguised as hand-held video games?

Spotting out-of-state license plates can work for a time. It’s tough to match the excitement of seeing an 18-wheeler roaring by with Tennessee and Oregon plates on the back and an Indiana tag on the front. It isn’t wise to make license-plate identification into a competition, though. Breaking up a fight over who caught sight of the Nebraska plate first is no easy feat, particularly while simultaneously trying to negotiate one’s way over the George Washington Bridge in a minivan, especially one with a “Vacationland” plate on it. Apparently, many New York area drivers are so envious of us Mainers that they’ll aggressively take out their resentment by cutting us off without signaling, and then angrily lean on their horn with the hand with which they’re not flipping us off.

There was indeed much to learn in the nation’s capital. Whoever oversees parking there apparently assumes that no one visiting or working in the area drives anything bigger than a motorcycle. Trying to maneuver any vehicle larger than a Toyota Prius into a DC-area underground parking space is the equivalent of attempting to coax a St. Bernard into a bird house. We eventually obtained secure (aka overpriced) parking at our hotel’s garage, although in the process of getting into the biggest available spot ”“ one designed to accommodate a Mini-Cooper with its front and rear bumpers removed ”“ I added several new beauty marks to our aging family chariot. It once looked like a soccer mom’s pride and joy, but now appears to belong to a demolition derby aficionado.

Fortunately, once we arrived there was no need to drive; the Metro, which is the District’s mass transit system, is easy to navigate. It’s also so spotless compared to other big city trains that one might be tempted to eat off the floor of one of its immaculate cars, although less than half of our party attempted to do so.

But what our kids will remember most vividly probably won’t be visiting the Washington Monument, Ford’s Theatre or the White House, or seeing Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy climb into a car near the Capitol building.

The longest-lasting recollection of our two youngest children will likely be the look on their brother’s face when the Metro doors shut behind him after he had boarded the train but the rest of us had not, just like their father will forever remember the horrified look on their mother’s face at the time of the same incident. Thankfully, after several agonizing seconds. the doors magically re-opened before the train took off, so we’ll never know if our 11-year-old would have survived on his own in a city where the most recent available statistics show a violent crime rate of 1,374.5 incidents per 100,000 residents.

Only one other vacation event could compete with that one: Passing a pickup truck with a North Dakota license plate in northeastern Connecticut on our way home.

— Andy Young teaches English at a York County high school. Despite his best efforts, neither he nor any of his family members saw a Kansas, Idaho or Arkansas license plate on their recent trip to the nation’s capital.