This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Editor's note • Robert Kirby is en route to Canada. This is a reprint of an earlier column.

Vacation this year was a family reunion at Bear Lake. Not my kin, of course. If it had been, you'd have seen something on the news about a riot.

It was my wife's family from Canada. They come down from under the ice cap every couple of years for a visit. They sit on the beach at Bear Lake badmouthing Utah drivers, Utah beer and our utterly confusing system of measurements.

"How fast is 65 mph down here?"

If they've had a few, I tell them it's 104,607 meters per hour or 10,460,736 centimeters per hour, depending, of course, on whether or not they're in Montana.

THEM: "We've never liked you, eh?"

ME: "Yeah? It's 4,249 furlongs back to the border."

Despite our differences, I like my wife's family. We don't see each other often enough to have developed any real interest in punching one another, even over something as divisive as the metric system.

Mostly, though, it's because we've been holding these reunions long enough to have learned what not to do at them. The same cannot be said of my family: There are still arrest warrants out for a couple of my uncles from the 1977 reunion.

Large extended family reunions lasting longer than 48 hours (12.7 Pluto days for you Canadians) are unnatural.

My wife does the planning for her family reunions. According to her calculations, the safest and most enjoyable family reunions are those that incorporate a lot of space.

For example, 20 square feet of living space per person is required to keep our family from getting one another's last nerve, especially if one of those people is me and I'm bored.

We learned the hard way not to cram too many family members into too small of a space. My wife and I and our three daughters once shared a cabin loft for five nights with a cousin of mine and his family.

Ralph was a church administrator. I was a cop. His sons were honor students. Our daughters taught them how to belch. Worse, according to Ralph, I was unforgivably profane because I occasionally said "hell."

Things were fine during the day. We played games, went on hikes and prepared meals with the rest of the family in the common areas. Trouble came at night when we crammed ourselves into the loft to sleep.

By Night 2, Ralph was convinced that I was Satan. By Night 4, his wife had developed a facial tic over a bit of gastric distress I was experiencing. They left a day early. That was 1988. We haven't seen or spoken to them since.

Space. Don't underestimate its importance. There's a reason why families scatter far and wide enough to need reunions. It's so we can still love people we don't necessarily like.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley