We're A Middle-Class Family. We Can't Afford To Go On Vacation — And We're Not The Only Ones.

When I was a kid, my family took vacations to California, Florida and Tennessee. The first time I stepped on an airplane, I was 8 years old and accompanied by a Cabbage Patch Kid named Erna Janine. It was 1983.

The grandparents who raised me were solidly middle-class. My grandmother was an administrative assistant to the head honcho at an aviation and electronics corporation. My grandfather had an equally boring job at Raytheon handling import/export. He was a lifer there, with a clock or watch waiting for him after 35 years of service. He smoked too much on flights to Egypt and Holland, bringing home wonders from a world I only knew from textbooks and postcards. We lived in a two-family home that my grandparents owned in a city 20 minutes outside of Boston.

My kids — ages 19, 17, 13 and 11 — have never been on an airplane. We have been on one vacation as a family of six, driving in our 8-year-old minivan across the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Florida. We used part of the money that my grandparents left me when they died. “Take the kids to Disney,” my grandmother said before she died of ovarian cancer in September 2013. It was a long ride, with kids from 11 to 3.

Growing up, taking a vacation was not a sign of luxury, but a yearly certainty for my family and most of my friends’ middle-class families. A trip to a dance show in Philadelphia, a week renting a house in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and a college adventure to California remain some of the coolest memories from my Gen X childhood.

Last year when my then-12-year-old daughter asked to try out for a competitive cheerleading travel team, I said yes, unsure of how we would afford the trip to Florida where the team would participate in a world cheer competition. As we