MY WIFE AND I used to have a simple formula for vacations: go to interesting places and have sex. It was a formula that stood the tests of both time and geography — from Truro to Mount Desert Island, from Washington to Montreal, from Amish country in Lancaster County to wine country in the Sonoma Valley.

We were married for more than a decade before our first child was born. So it was many years before we were forced to contend with the equally simple formula for vacationing with kids: go to uninteresting places and not have sex.

We have spent a cumulative total of two weeks in my in-laws’ time-share at Disney World, touching but, you know, not touching, because the king-size bed we occupied adjoined another king-size bed that contained our son and daughter. Barbara and I have slept atop an air mattress inside a tent, quite warm and comfortable, and between the sheets in motels where if the walls could have talked I have no doubt we would have been highly entertained. But with Tim and Becky on the other side of the tent or squeaking on the springs of a rollaway cot at the foot of the bed, making — or even attempting — whoopee was never an option.

Years ago, during our trip to Montreal, we had a few drinks at Grumpy’s and couldn’t wait to go to bed. Now we were grumpy, and the only thing we could do in bed was ponder the next day’s fun-fun-fun-filled slog through Storyland before falling asleep. Jesus.

Over time, though, I’ve learned that there are compensations. These gooey child-care experts and gushing TV moms are always saying that you can learn from your kids, but I have to say I was skeptical. The lesson I would have liked to learn from our kids was how to stay home watching cartoons all day while they fought traffic and went to work. But that didn’t seem likely.

Instead, the lesson I learned was more existential, and it came from watching them on vacation. They were having a great time. And they weren’t having sex!

The solution, I realized, was to approach vacation like a kid. No, not act like kid; at 45, I’m still trying to figure out how to act like an adult. I mean go back to doing some of the things I liked to do when I was a kid — something we could all do together.

For me, that meant the outdoors — hiking, bicycling, and backpacking. I had been stomping around the White Mountains since I was a 12-year-old Boy Scout, but as I got older, it got harder and harder to do. Not physically (okay, I’m lying), but logistically: most of my old friends from my hometown were too busy, too flabby, or both. My friend Brad was able to get up from Washington maybe every other fall, but other than that, I was limited to a very occasional day hike on my own.

One June day when Tim was nine and a half, I tried taking him along. We hiked up and down Mount Tecumseh. It wasn’t easy for him — like me more than 30 years before, Tim moves slowly, throwing off vast quantities of carbon dioxide and sweat for every yard of forward motion. But he loved it.

I realized that I had an opportunity to reconnect with an important part of my childhood. And to help my son learn the same love of the outdoors that I had learned when I was his age.

CLICHÉS BECOME clichés because they’re often true. For instance: life is full of compromises.

In our family, strapping on a backpack and heading out to the mountains is strictly a father-and-son operation. Barbara will help pitch a tent and cook a meal outdoors in the rain, but her idea of hiking is to circumnavigate the mall a few times. Becky likes to camp, but a disability — dwarfism — means she’ll probably never walk more than a couple of miles at a stretch. Besides, even if she could handle it physically, I have no doubt that she would pronounce the whole thing a massive bore as soon as we got 100 yards into the woods. So as much as I’d love to see the four of us head off into the mountains, it’s not going to happen.

Then, too, there’s nothing wrong with doing guy things with your son.

Following our tentative first step up Tecumseh in the summer of 2000, we decided to go for something considerably more ambitious last year. In August, I took Tim and his friend Troy to Galehead Hut — the most out-of-the-way of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s hiking lodges — on what turned out to be the hottest day of the summer. It was 100 degrees in Greater Boston, and I was fully prepared to encounter a humid 96 degrees at the base of Galehead, accompanied by a black swarm of mosquitoes. (Although I didn’t tell the boys, I was also fully prepared to turn around and drive home; the hell with the $250 we’d already paid.) But we got lucky: it was in the 80s, dry, and bug-free. We took our time and made it to the hut in maybe five hours.

The boys were exhausted, especially after a nearly vertical climb during the last hour and a half. But as soon as they saw the hut, they sprang back to life. There’s nothing like a crew of friendly college students (whose one annoying aspect is that they insist on spelling it "croo") cooking everyone a terrific meal while you just sit and watch. After supper we explored a bit and watched a Fourth of July–quality heat-lightning storm. Then it was off to the bunkhouse for the night, surrounded by other snoring hikers.

During three decades in the mountains, the only time I had previously stayed in a hut was in 1998, when Brad and I begged our way into Zealand Hut on Columbus Day weekend following two days in the rain. But Tim and Troy were younger than I was when I had started hiking, and I knew how demoralizing a pup tent and a crappy trailside meal could be after a long day on the trail, especially when the whole experience was new and overwhelming. So I’d made the right choice.

The next day we climbed South and North Twin Mountains, much of it in an unexpected driving rainstorm (if any storm in the White Mountains can really be considered unexpected). Later in the day it cleared. After supper we scrambled up nearby Galehead Mountain, with its spectacular view of the Pemigewasset Wilderness. Following another night in Galehead, we hiked out the next day. The whole thing was such a success that, in September, Tim and I hiked up to the Lonesome Lake Hut by ourselves, and then climbed Cannon Mountain the following morning.

This August, Tim, Troy, and I are going for the biggest one of them all: Mount Washington and the Northern Presidential Range, spending the first night in Madison Hut and the second in the legendary Lake of the Clouds Hut, which I have not laid eyes on since 1969.

I can’t wait.

SHARING MY LOVE of the outdoors is one way I can reconnect with my youth and connect with my son at the same time. Another way is through scouting.

Now, I realize how politically incorrect it is to be involved with the Boy Scouts of America, let alone admit it. The BSA discriminates against gays and atheists. And yes, the self-appointed guardians of morality who run the organization from their bunker in Irving, Texas, ought to grow up and get over it.

But scouting was important to me, and I hope it’s important to Tim as well. (I do think it’s vital that those of us involved in scouting who oppose the BSA’s discriminatory policies speak out, and I have — in a couple of letters to the local newspapers, and in occasional pieces in the Phoenix. See "Scouts, Gays, and the Illogic of the Law," This Just In, July 7, 2000.)

For the past three years I’ve been the assistant leader of Tim’s Cub Scout den. A few weeks ago, five other fathers and I dressed up as Native Americans and whooped and hollered our way through a morality tale that was equal parts profound and cheesy, as Tim and nine other Webelos scouts "crossed over" into Boy Scouts. Offensive to Native Americans? Maybe a little, but also respectful of their beliefs and traditions. Trust me: we were enlightenment personified compared to, say, Chief Wahoo, the Cleveland Indians’ grinning idiot of a mascot.

For me, though, the lesson was in what it means to reach out to kids not on one’s own terms, but on their terms — to yell and run around a campfire utterly without irony or detachment or embarrassment. Ten- and 11-year-old boys are certainly old enough to learn to respect and appreciate everyone, gay and straight, of all religions and nationalities. But they’re too young to be burdened with every adult nuance and hypersensitive twitch about such matters.

That will come soon enough.

In July, we’re spending a week in scout camp, Tim as one of the new kids, I as an assistant scoutmaster. As a kid, I never much liked summer camp — it was too regimented, with too much emphasis on uniforms and drills and marching around. It lacked the drama and adventure of my troop’s fall trips into the mountains and winter camping trips and early-summer five-day 50-milers along the Appalachian Trail.

But Tim’s looking forward to it, and so am I.

I HAD TO LAUGH when my editor asked me to write a piece about "sex, romance, and family life." "How about ‘sex, romance, or family life’?" I replied.

Barbara and I have not been away overnight without the kids in five and a half years. Despite vowing repeatedly that we’re going to do better, we can’t seem to get our act together sufficiently to line up a sitter more than once every two or three months. Our big nights out invariably consist of going to a medium-priced restaurant where jeans and sneakers are acceptable, drinking maybe one beer each (any more and we’d fall asleep), and talking about — yes — the kids. The last new non-kiddie movie we saw in an actual theater was Jurassic Park II. And it sucked.

But the time that any of us has children at home is short, and, as our kids grow older, we realize this with increasing urgency. Tim’s now 11; Becky’s nine and a half. In nine or 10 years, both of them are likely to be out of the house. (They’d damn well better be.)

So when I start feeling nostalgic for the ’80s — when Barbara and I could spend a day in San Francisco or Montreal or Washington or just hanging out at home, followed by an evening of romance unencumbered by the complications of parenthood — I try to remind myself that those days will return soon enough. Oh, sure, it won’t be completely the same. They say you never stop worrying about your children, and of that I have no doubt. But I imagine we’ll get back some of the sense of independence, the sense of self, that you put on hold during the years when your main responsibility is to someone else.

Another cliché that’s absolutely true: this is an incredibly rich, rewarding time in our lives. But, naturally, we look forward to the time when we can once again go to interesting places.

And, well, you know.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net