Franconia, N.H. ? We were going to climb Mount Pemigewasset, which juts out from the cliffs that form Indian Head and has a remarkable panorama of White Mountain summits at the top.

We were going to find the semi-secret Saco River swimming hole, down the embankment, over the railroad tracks, then up the far embankment near an ancient bridge known as Fourth Iron.

We were going to sink our toes into the sandy beach at Ellacoya State Park and, what is more, we were going to learn to pronounce the name of the Indian princess for which it was known.

We were going to do all these things, on vacation, but then it was time to go.

We were going to do all these things. But instead we took a back road and planted ourselves on Freedom Beach on Lake Ossipee and looked across the whitecaps up onto the sylvan slopes of Mount Chocorua.

Instead we sat with friends on a screen porch on a New Hampshire hill with a perfect view of Vermont’s Killington Mountain, eating one too many slices of gooey butter cake, homemade of course.

Instead we lingered at the base of the steep granite face known as Cathedral Ledge, wondering whether those black marks were climbers hanging from the 500-foot granite cliff or just gnarly vestiges of trees extending from the outcroppings below its prow.

Perhaps the best-loved verse from Franconia’s greatest poet speaks of roads not taken. The last three lines of the poem — published in 1920 in a book titled, not coincidentally, “Mountain Interval” — are hardwired into the memory of every American of a certain age. But it is another insight from that same Robert Frost poem that concerns us here: “knowing how way leads on to way.”

For our vacation way led onto way, and we found ourselves at a Vermont sugar house where the soft-serve ice cream (the term of art in these parts is “creemie”) is laced with maple syrup, a gallon in each container of the mix. Two days later we found ourselves in Bethlehem, N.H., where, as it turns out, the Frost family rented rooms from a farmer in 1907, and there we encountered an 8-year-old girl crossing the street as she brandished a towering mass of soft serve, this time chocolate swirled with coffee. We stopped there, too, way having led onto way.

“Our summer was one of the pleasantest we have had for years,” Frost wrote of the time he spent in Bethlehem. “There is a pang there that makes poetry.”

Our vacations now are swirls of pangs and poetry, and not just because we are drawn every year to the places Frost trod, three of them this summer alone, if you include the country college he — and this is his phrase — ran away from.

We don’t plan that sort of thing. We’re not literary travelers, just vacationers off on a spree, or, more precisely, just away from the office. But it happens, every year. That’s the part about the poetry.

Now here’s the part about the pangs. Our girls are older, and really they aren’t girls anymore but women. And we know that this year, or maybe the next, or perhaps the year after that, they will be too busy, or too worldly, or (most likely of all) too embarrassed to be seen of a summer afternoon with Mom and Dad, even though we know they say of New Hampshire, when we are not listening, something along the lines of: “She’s one of the two best states in the Union. Vermont’s the other.”

When they abandon us we’ll remember all the times we shared, how we showed them the way the clouds seem to hang around the summit of Mount Washington, how we showed them the best way to enter a lake whose waters are icy even in midsummer heat, how we showed them which rocks along the path are sturdy and which shift under foot.

But most of all we will remember what they showed us, and by that I am not speaking of the way to collect low-brush blueberries in a bucket, because we know they learned that from a book by Robert McCloskey, nor of how to race up the Presidential Range in the rain, because long ago I took down this passage from the 1925 “Guide to Paths in the White Mountains and Adjacent Regions”:

“If trouble arises on or above Mount Monroe, use the Lake of the Clouds Hut or go down the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail. This is the most dangerous part of the path. Never under any circumstance attempt the cone of Mount Washington if a storm has caused serious trouble before its base is reached, for storms increase in violence very rapidly as the cone is ascended and the velocity of the wind sometimes exceeds 100 miles an hour on the summit.”

No, what we learned from our daughters is more prosaic and yet more profound. It is how the joys of youth are passed from child to parent, shaping the one, refreshing the other, and it happens when the child takes the hard steps, up mountains real and metaphorical. We’ve seen them ascend both, knowing that the lessons of mountains and metaphors are sometimes the same, the learning sometimes steep.

So maybe it doesn’t matter that we were going to stop at Shiloh’s Restaurant in Woodsville, N.H., where the sign boasts of “cabin cooking,” which to me is a phrase as irresistible as the open-faced hot turkey sandwich I yearn for the other 51 weeks of the year. We never made it this year.

And perhaps it doesn’t matter that we were going to take a picnic to Sabbaday Falls near the Jigger Johnson Campground, named for one of the last of the great loggers of the North Country, a man described by his friend, Bob Monahan, another legend of these hills, in this unforgettable way: “All of him was steel-spring muscle, except his head, which contained brains aplenty.” We didn’t get there either.

I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Maybe none of this matters at all. Maybe the only thing that matters is that there is a poetry to family vacations, and a pang, too. We were going to do so much. And then it was time to go.