Mark Wolf was a columnist and feature writer with the Rocky Mountain News for 24 years and 23 days until it closed. Here is one of his columns from probably the 1980s that I saved.

"Ok, let's hear it: 'Are we there yet?'

We have come to a great decision about this year's vacation. We're starting the fight before we leave. What fight? The fight you have with your spouse on your vacation. Don't tell me you don't fight on your vacation. Everybody fights on their vacation. It's the American Way.

The stupidest fights in the world occur on vacations. I remember my dad and mom not speading for most of a day because my mom had folded the map the 'wrong' way.

Fights aside, only two things really matter about vacations: getting an early start and making good time. This has been passed down through generations of fathers, for whom vacations are two weeks of Beat the Clock. I remember our great family vacation of 1958. We went to California and stayed in a cottage across the street from the beach. I fought a "gunfight" in the streets of Knotts Berry Farm and played for a couple of hours on Tom Sawyer's Island at Disneyland. We swam in the ocean and played on the beach. It was the greatest vacation of my life.

Bring up that vacation to my father and the only thing he says is: "Your mother made us stop on the edge of town because she was sure she left the iron on. Cost us 25 minutes and we never made it up."

On the other hand, a dreadfully hot July visit to a great uncle in Texas in 1953 is remembered this way by dad: "Out the door at 6 a.m., only stopped twice a day. Made great time."

Dads always drive on vacation. If you see a woman driving a car full of kids with a man in the front seat on the interstate, call the cops. That woman is being taken hostage. Dads drive because vacations turn us into Road Warriors and because we are certain no one can read a road map like we can. You can lash your steering wheel to the window post and sleep for an hour on I-70 through Kansas without veering out of your lane. Still, dad won't let anybody else drive "because I know this road better than you do."

One dad I know is so compulsive about vacation driving that he steers with his thigh at 70 mph so his hands are free to mark the AAA road maps with symbols that indicate which fast-food restaurants and gas stations are located at each exit.

And I hardly ever miss one."