Just before school ended for the summer in 1977, my parents announced that our family — parents, six girls and a golden retriever — would be taking a camping trip across the country.

And did we.

A real family vacation.

Trust me, a family of eight plus a panting dog traveling 10,000 miles over two months in a GMC van rigged with a second-hand four-speed transmission is as real as it gets.

In advance of the trip, my father wrote to tourist agencies across the country to get maps, and charted a route out West and back across 20 states and three Canadian provinces, marking dozens of campgrounds along the way.

The cost of the eight-week adventure was $2,500, which is probably less than it would have cost to stay home, with a singular extravagance of kenneling the dog for a half-day so she wouldn’t bake in the 120-degree heat while we toured Harrah’s auto museum in Reno.

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We left our home on New York’s Long Island before dawn on a day in early July.

First stop? Detroit.

Yep. Eight hundred miles on that first day as we pushed to attend a family barbecue. After that, things slowed down a bit, but the daily travel remained constant as we forged through Manitoba and Saskatchewan toward the province of Alberta to attend the Calgary Stampede, an astounding cowboy convention of calf-roping and bronco riding.

That same week, I distinctly remember standing on a glacier’s frozen edge at Banff National Park while the air temperature was well over 90 degrees. That night it snowed, and I put on every piece of clothing I had to stay warm, including the gauze skirt I packed to wear for Mass.

We all learned a lot about coping before “just deal” became part of our national vernacular.

When we left home, someone (who remains unknown to this day) forgot to pack spoons in the camp kitchen silverware tray, which made eating cereal and mixing hot chocolate a little tricky.

When we were in Winnipeg, we ate at a restaurant for the first time on the trip, and were thrilled to see spoons set on the table.

“Look, Mommy!” my younger sister Janet said. “They have spoons!”

Her exclamation made it sound as if spoons were some miracle innovation, and my mother quietly asked us all to pocket one. We obediently did, and my father left enough cash on the table to pay for the stainless.

Later, while heading south toward Washington State, as we waited for an early-morning ferry from Victoria to Seattle, we coped with breakfast hunger by making pancakes out of the back of the van and dining between cars in the parking lot.

Other travelers gawked as we mixed, cooked, ate and cleaned up in the 30 minutes we waited for the ferry to cross the strait toward us.

We all became, after a few short weeks, masters of time management.

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This was a camping trip and, with two or three exceptions, we pitched tents at a different park every night, usually stopping around dinnertime and preferably while it was still light.

Here’s how it worked:

We arrived at a site and one daughter, usually 14-year-old Karen, would walk the dog. My older sister Debbie and I would unload two canvas tents, sleeping bags and duffel bags from the rooftop carrier, enlisting the youngest sisters to help set up the tents and deposit bags and duffels inside. My father started the campfire, 12-year-old Janet set up camp chairs and the back-of-the-van kitchen, and Theresa, who is Daughter No. 5 and was 10 years old at the time, mixed our mother a martini. Then, we all pitched in to fix dinner, do dishes and, if the campground offered free shower facilities, we would wash up. If we had to pay, no showers for us.

Consequently, washing became a luxury.

At one campground, rabbits hopped under and around the outdoor shower stalls. At another, inside, frogs did the same. And, once, when our youngest sister, Connie, needed a bath and we were at a pay-shower campground, Janet bathed her in the stainless steel bathroom sink during a particularly horrid thunderstorm.

Connie was 7 years old and has never forgiven us for that, or for so many other things.

My mother, always fearful we would be eaten by bears, made us swing a cowbell on every trip to the bathroom, shower or not.

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As we traveled south along the West Coast, we marveled at the seals along the Oregon shore and soaked in the smells and sights of San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square and nearby Fisherman’s Wharf. And, since we were in the city, my father squeezed the hulking GMC down Lombard Street as the six girls squealed in our seats (and my mother hissed in hers).

San Francisco was the second — and last — time we ate in a restaurant that summer.

After leaving the City by the Bay, we skirted through San Jose and avoided Los Angeles altogether. Instead, we headed to Nevada and on into Idaho.

While we were in California, we had picked up mail that had been forwarded to “general delivery” at Bodega Bay. Unfortunately for us, 17-year-old Debbie’s boyfriend had mailed her a 30-minute audiotape professing his undying love for her and, in the confines of the van, she looped that scratchy tape endlessly on her recorder. Remember, this was before ear buds, so we were all forced to listen to the sickeningly sweet romantic teenage musings. Again, and again.

After two days the audiotape was “accidentally” lost.

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While there was always a flurry of activity as we set up and broke down camp each day, the un-air-conditioned van was our home that summer.

My father did the lion’s share of the driving, but my mother took the wheel at least once in each state and province just to say she had.

While under way, the amount of fluid we consumed was strictly limited to curtail potty breaks. Because, let’s face it, getting six girls out of the van, into the restroom and back in the van was never quick and we had a schedule to keep. So, each day we were limited to two cans of soda among the six of us, sharing with sisters of our choice. My mother would watch each gulp, counting swallows so no one girl drank more than her share.

And, to further limit disembarking from the van, when we stopped at the occasional historic or scenic marker, my father (a respected Wall Street lawyer) would get out of the van alone, read the marker and act out a scene. For instance, at Oregon’s Crater Lake, we sisters witnessed his roadside wild mime of a volcanic collapse as if the impromptu performance was a perfectly normal event.

*          *          *

When we were in the Redwood National Forest we all grabbed hands and tried to stretch ourselves around tree trunks, we were too afraid to get out of the van when we saw a herd of buffalo in a field at Yellowstone, we learned all about beer at the Coors plant in Golden, Colo., and felt like we had discovered South Dakota’s Badlands all by ourselves.

We were in Idaho on my 16th birthday, one of the brightest memories of the trip for me. My sisters urged me to sleep late while they fixed breakfast and, when I finally unzipped the tent, they had gathered dozens of small stones and spelled out “Happy Birthday Judy” just outside the door flap.

I love my sisters.

Later that day, as we set up the tents next to a lake, black clouds rolled in and the wind picked up. When lightning cracked and hail started falling, we abandoned dinner prep and ran for the van. The ice hitting the roof was so loud that we couldn’t hear Connie — the 7-year-old — screaming for help.

She had gone into one of the tents to set up her own sleeping bag and was trapped, some 50 feet from the van. We argued who should go retrieve her and, finally, Debbie couldn’t stand the squabbling and ran to the rescue.

As they both climbed — dripping wet — in the van, my mother held her martini glass outside the sliding door and captured hail the perfect size of cocktail ice cubes.

It was a pretty memorable birthday.

*          *          *

During the course of the summer, Connie developed a sleepwalking habit and my parents started locking the tents at night — using suitcase-style locks on the zipper ends — to keep us from wandering off.

The sleeping arrangements split the oldest three girls in one tent, the youngest three in the second tent and our parents slept in the van.

At a park near Yosemite, a short time after we were locked down, we heard the sound of trash cans being turned over some yards away. We thought it was raccoons, until we heard the growling.

Debbie was the only one in our tent brave enough to zip down the window and peer out, and she saw three bears tearing through the trash. We started screaming for our parents to unlock the tent so we could get in the van, but they never heard us because the van windows were closed.

The next morning, our parents confessed they had also heard the noise and saw the bears but were certain the animals were more interested in the trash than in the six girls bedded down nearby.

Really?

The park ranger didn’t think so.

*          *          *

My parents and sisters all have different memories of the trip.

I don’t remember where we were on Aug. 16, but I surely remember it was the day Elvis Presley died, because my ordinarily fun-loving mother cried for hours.

Karen can’t remember the original words to “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” because we re-wrote the lyrics to something more like “We’ve Been Riding in the Car (all the livelong day).” Singing was what families did during long trips decades ago.

Debbie doesn’t remember what the boyfriend said on the audiotape. I’m not even sure she remembers his name.

Theresa doesn’t remember her martini duties, but Connie definitely remembers being trapped in the tent during the hailstorm. We all do.

Janet remembers our parents’ seeming insistence that we fry fish whenever we were in bear country and — post Yosemite — letting Connie sleep with them in the security of the van while the rest of us quaked in the tents.

My mother remembers our total fascination with the wacky legend of the Ogopogo monster that lives in Okanagan Lake in British Columbia.

And, one night in California, after all the children were asleep, my father remembers escorting my mother to the outdoor shower and removing the overhead light bulb so they could have a little privacy there together.

What we collectively remember is that the trip was equal parts exhilarating and exhausting, and what we all cherish is the wonderful, crazy and cohesive time we spent together as a family. It wasn’t perfect, but it was perfectly us.

Judith Meyer lives in Buckfield.