It doesn't take much to stress weary travelers

Summer vacations can be stressful. I'm sure that doesn't come as a revelation to many of you who grew up torturing your siblings and your parents from the back of a four-door sedan or a wood-paneled station wagon.

But now that I'm on the other end of that equation — the one who is being tortured while also trying to keep one eye on the road and another on my billfold — I know that the stresses can often come close to outweighing the joys.

As I write this, my wife and some of our children are still making their way home from a simple trip to the grandparents in Washington state — a trip that fractured badly on the way home.

The car broke down along a dusty, sagebrush-covered hill 130 miles southeast of Seattle. We limped into the city of Yakima only to find that no one was available on a holiday weekend to order a part, let alone install it. Car rental agencies were closed, as well, and even when they reopened on Tuesday, the cost they quoted for renting a family van over several days would have made flying everyone home seem like a bargain. The only car-related people on the job for the holiday were in sales, and they were more than eager to try to move the clean one-owner minivan that happened to be on the lot, even as they solemnly assured us our otherwise sturdy car wasn't worth the price of scrap metal as a trade-in.

In the end, I ended up flying home with one child, who had to be at a summer P.E. class for which we'd paid good money. The rest waited around for the mechanics before resuming the long, hot road back into the arid American West. The last time I talked to them, somewhere in Oregon, I could hear the 3-year-old in the back seat screaming the words to "Row, row, row your boat" to an unrecognizable tune.

I imagine that if we'd gotten confused (an easy thing to do with a carload of kids and an engine that makes strange noises) and accidentally parked in a restricted parking spot in an unfamiliar city, and then gotten a boot attached to our car, it would have been the perfect topper to a horrible adventure. Perhaps, if not for the lure of Grandma and Grandpa, it would have been enough to keep us from going back to the otherwise enjoyable places we visited.

The Salt Lake City Council and Mayor Rocky Anderson currently are hashing out a proposed ordinance that would restrict the use of boots — clamps that lock in place over a car's wheel and render movement impossible. This is because some private companies here are using booting services to patrol illegal parking on their lots, and it's generating a lot of complaints.