WE HAVE VACATIONED AT THE same Delaware beaches for all our family life because we never could imagine being trapped in a hot car with two cranky kids for any longer than the two hours it takes to get there. God forbid we should visit the Badlands or the Grand Canyon.

We have vacationed at the same Delaware beaches for all our family life also because we don't like surprises.

This year there were two. Big ones.

There is something comforting in the predictability of these vacations. Something for everyone, from my 6-year-old nephew to my 60-year-old husband, and for the teenagers in between.

But this time, we packed some sadness in the van, along with the beach towels and frozen casseroles.

Our son, stationed in Pensacola, Fla., with the Marines, had no hope of joining us. My daughter, working a summer internship, might make the trip across the Bay Bridge once, for a day and a night. That would be all.

Our nieces and our nephew are lively enough to distract us from a nuclear accident, let alone any private troubles. And their parents have always been the best company and the best partners for this adventure.

But to return alone to the place where our own children had danced in the waves and dribbled ice cream down their shirts and thrown tantrums outside toy stores is a kind of grief that you keep to yourself because the parents of the small children around you who are dribbling ice cream and throwing tantrums would never understand.

Anyway, my daughter operates in that space-time dimension that Albert Einstein discovered -- the one where the universe is a trampoline and time is a bowling ball in the middle of it -- so it was no surprise when my cell phone rang 18 hours after Jessie said she would arrive.

"Mom," she shrieked. "It was so not my fault."

The police officer disagreed, and that's why he gave her a ticket for following too closely. She had delivered only a glancing blow to the car in front of her, but she was at fault and her car was damaged enough to be towed.

We drove to rescue Jessie and her friend Lilly by the side of the road, where they were flipping their cell phones and drinking Arizona teas under the watchful eye of that hard-hearted police officer.

"Where were you?" Jessie howled.

"I'm sorry," I said to the officer. "You must feel like you've been trapped in an episode of The Simple Life."

On the ride back to the beach, Jessie let it slip that it had not been her old heap that had been towed away, but her father's sun-roofed, V-6.

Apparently I was supposed to have figured that out from the muddy picture of the damage that she sent to me on my cell phone, in lieu of a conversation.

"You never even asked if I was all right," she said, by way of explaining why she was driving her dad's car.

"Your decibel level gave it away," I said. "Your condition, I mean. Not which car you were driving."

Apparently the girls did not suffer any soft-tissue damage because they were dressed like starlets and ready to go out dancing almost as soon as we arrived back at the condo.

My nieces and my nephew could only gape, as if it were, indeed, an episode from The Simple Life they were watching.

(My husband was the taxi driver that night, there being a sudden shortage of cars. He said he could have made 200 bucks betting the young guys in the parking lot that he'd leave with better-looking girls than they did.)

A couple of nights later -- Jessie had gone back to work and life had returned to black and white -- my husband was sitting on the boardwalk nursing a frozen yogurt.

He was thinking of his son, and of the yogurt Joe had dribbled on his shirts during all the years of our beach vacations. Every little blond boy who walked past seem to remind him of Joe.

But none more than the 6-footer who walked up to him that night on the boardwalk and said, smiling, "Hey, Dad."

susan.reimer@baltsun.com