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.…