Two hours into another day of his family’s beach vacation, Brandon Hubacher had sent 50 text messages to his friends back home.
“Chillen on the beach,” the 16-year-old messaged a buddy at 12:04 p.m., the ocean surf beckoning mere yards away.
“Luckyy,” the friend zipped back.
Unplugging could not have been further from the teenager’s mind.
“I wouldn’t think about it,” he said as he eyed the ocean, a Redskins cap turned backward on his head. Only for a swim would he and his cellphone part ways, he said.
Thus is digital technology making an indelible mark on the long tradition of the American family vacation.
With the miles between home and away so easily traversed by limitless texting and by laptops that connect to Facebook and Skype, the family getaway to the beach or the lake has become just another frontier transformed by the digital age.
At the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the school-aged play Xbox Live in rental houses with friends hundreds of miles away. From resort towns, they post Facebook photos and messages. At state parks, there are iPods and Nintendo DS consoles packed into minivans along with marshmallows and fishing rods. Everywhere are parents who could not make the trip without a computer or BlackBerry.
Not everyone wants a break from the usual rhythms of family life.
“I think for the kids, it’s the best of both worlds: They can stay connected and still be on vacation,” says mom Nancy Hubacher, 47, of Fairfax Station, Va., who was herself sending work e-mail from a beach chair this week, as her husband chatted on his phone.
Still, some families find technology at odds with vacation — that idealized time of shared activities and bonding — and some have banned certain devices outright.
“It can be a source of tension,” says Scott Campbell, a new-media scholar at the University of Michigan. “As a parent, you spend money and time to get away from all of the things you’re normally embedded in, and your kids aren’t getting away from them.” But many parents are themselves unable to unplug, he said. “
The digital age has left many families looking for the right balance.
The Hoppmans of Rockville, Md., have strict limits on electronics during the school year, but summers come with more freedom. Nicole Hoppman, 43, says her two teenage sons spend a lot of time on Facebook and her 11-year-old likes video games. But when the family set out for Bethany Beach, Del., in mid-June, they forgot their laptop at home.
For four days, they did not go online.
The family took walks in the mornings and evenings. They watched the World Cup together. There was a trip out for breakfast, another for ice cream. They talked more than they might have.
With her teenage sons in particular, Hoppman said, “I think they definitely would not have done any of that if they could have been on Facebook.”
Under bright blue beach umbrellas in Rehoboth, there were plenty of ideas about technology’s place on vacation.
For most of the past decade, the Hubacher family has vacationed with the Johnson family of Severna Park, Md. The parents go back to the mid- 1980s, when three of them worked at a radio station. At the beach, they like to spend time by the ocean, hit a water park, do a sushi restaurant, play miniature golf. Their sons are the same age; so are their daughters.
Lately, technology is part of the mix. Each teen has a cellphone and an iPod Touch.
Grace Johnson, 13, was saying technology makes vacation better.
Her mother, Anne Johnson, 48, was unconvinced.
“I think it’s tragic,” she said. “You text too much. You kids aren’t in the moment.” She recalled how just the night before, as they all gathered for dinner at a Rehoboth Beach restaurant, the parents realized all four teens were surreptitiously texting friends — and one another — from cellphones positioned in their laps, under the table.
Down the beach a bit, Rick Poremba, 19, of Pittsburgh, said that vacation had actually slowed his texting down: His 4,000-text-a-month habit ebbed like the tide when he went to Rehoboth with his large extended family. “It’s a family vacation,” he shrugged. “I’d rather spend it with the family.”
