“Mom, what does ‘yadda yadda’ mean?”

It was a question piped up from the back seat as our car rolled into the first hotel parking lot of our trip. Considering that the atmosphere in the car was pretty thick with tension given that this was the 18th hotel we’d called looking for a room, it inspired a welcome giggle in both John and I—one that immediately flushed the ‘I told you so’ mood out the window.

You see, I might be parenting the only person who’s learned the phrase “yadda yadda” from an obscure ’70s song instead of from an episode of Seinfeld.

“We’re going to keep our kid screen-free,” was John’s and my battle cry while we were awaiting Toby’s arrival and reading parenting blogs and imagining what amazing parents we’d be. Anyone who’s been down that road knows that most of those battle cries are immediately drowned out by the reality of placating a tot-sized tyrant. But by some weird twist of fate, we have succeeded that that one goal—after he turned 4, Toby has begun to watch 30 minutes of YouTube videos on Sunday afternoons when he’s had a good weekend (John found a 1980-ish series called Mighty Machines that has them both transfixed), but otherwise his only contact with electronics is FaceTiming with relatives.

But then we planned a week-long vacation, driving to Lake Placid, N.Y., via the scenic route and back again. That’s HOURS in the car with a 4-year-old. There is only so much coloring a kid can do and 20 questions a family can play. Something had to give in the electronic sphere.

Enter my father’s iPod. It’s pretty ancient, and very definitely outdated technology, but he was willing to give it up ever since I gifted him with an old iPhone to use as a kitchen timer and music archive (seriously, those are my father’s only uses for a cell phone.). Toby inherited the iPod, complete with my father’s extremely eclectic playlist loaded on it. Think Beatles and Zac Brown Band and Allison Krauss and Joe Cocker. Heavy on the folksy, even heavier on the obscure. I Amazoned up a pair of headphones for the munchkin and bam, he was entertained for hours. Well, more like 30 minutes, given the battery life of the ancient iPod.

After Day 1 of iPod exploration, Toby had a few questions. The most pressing was the meaning of “yadda yadda,” since he’d discovered Dory Previn’s lyrical vocal stylings in Dad’s playlist.

Not familiar with “Yadda Yadda” the song? (Shocker!)

This is one of my dad’s favorites, and a true stalwart of my childhood. The words to Yadda Yadda and Dory’s other “hit,” “Twenty Mile Zone” (I’ll let you Google that one yourselves) are etched forever in my mind, having been listened to and sung so many times in my youth. You know, just like “Rocky Raccoon” by the Beatles. I was not exaggerating when I described Dad’s music tastes as “eclectic.”

The song became even more of our family lore when my cousin, a budding filmmaker and visiting one summer, overlaid the “yadda yadda” chorus over footage of my father and his two brothers having one of their epic existential arguments about how to solve the world’s problems.

So, the fact that out of the hundred or so songs on that iPod, Toby zeroed in on that one was quite hilarious and also kind of heart-warming. Thank God, because I needed something to distract us from the travesty of a hotel we were about to spend the night in.

In daily life, I’m a planner. I like to know what I’m doing each minute of the day, and I get twitchy when things go off schedule. Apparently, once I go on vacation, that tendency goes out the window. We hit the road on Saturday morning for New York, planning to see some sights along the way—our only existing hotel reservation was in Lake Placid on Monday night. The shit started to hit the fan when John asked what our route was the night before we left. “North,” I told him. I’ll leave the rest of the conversation to your imagination.

So we headed north the next morning, and made our first stop in Gettysburg. Gorgeous, thought-provoking, and very difficult to explain to a 4-year-old. As we pulled out of Gettysburg, John expressed an interest in seeing the “Delaware Water Gap,” whatever that is. (I still don’t know, for reasons that will be obvious later.) He said, “Have you found us a hotel along the way yet? It’s Saturday night, so rooms off the interstate might be hard to find,” he added.

Pshaw, I thought. I’m a die-hard traveler. Making reservations hours ahead of time is for pansies. We’ll just get to where we want to stop for the night (just south of the whatever water gap) and find a room. Easy peasy.

So, as we approached that water gap area (which was eminently more remote and in-the-middle-of-nowhere than I anticipated), I fired up my Hotels.com app. I searched for a room for 2 adults, and…. just one came up. At a “Pocono Palace Resort.” Intriguing, I thought. It looked swanky, and relatively affordable. There was a hot tub in each room, but only king beds available. I didn’t see any sign of a cot available or pull-out couch. We had to stash Toby somewhere. I re-started my search, adding a child to my criteria.

Poof, the available room disappeared. Color me even more intrigued. I went directly to the hotel’s website. It was there that I saw the writing on the wall. “Romantic rooms, champagne glass whirlpool hot-tubs, COUPLES ONLY.” Ding! Went my brain. I’d come a few clicks from booking our first night of family vacation in a seedy shag-spot.

We got a good laugh out of it then, and an even bigger one when we actually passed the Pocono Palace sign from the highway and the tagline was “Get your summer lovin’ here!!”

In retrospect, sleeping three to a king-size vibrating bed and bathing in a champagne glass hot tub may have been preferable to what actually went down.

The only available room via Hotels.com OTHER than the Pocono Palace was ABOVE the Delaware Water Gap, which meant that we drove through this apparently remarkable tourist destination in the pitch dark. “Looks pretty!” I chirped to my very grumpy husband as the headlights occasionally highlighted a scenic spot. It was about 2 hours past Toby’s bedtime (honestly, and John’s) by this point. We were having a ton of fun.

We emerged from whatever the Delaware Water Gap is (It just looked like a road through a forest next to a river to me, but I promise we’ll go back in the daylight sometime John.) and Google told me how to get to our hotel room. The hotel had, let’s just put it this way, seen better days. Anyone who knows me knows how skeeved out I am by a clean, new hotel room. This. was. not. that.

But we were all beyond tired. So, after Toby exclaimed, “This room is stanky!” we all settled in and I averted my eyes from the water stains on the ceiling and I didn’t touch the floor and I covered the remote with the ice bag even though we didn’t touch the TV and I inserted myself into the bed by sheer force of OCD-quelling will.

We woke the next morning all in distinctly better moods, I swore to reform my hotel-booking ways, Toby fired up “Yadda Yadda” on the iPod, and away we went.