Family vacations

Maybe it's just a curse or something, but my family tends to have some weird vacations. I think we're just a magnet for trouble. I've recounted some for you below.

Myrtle Beach

Every year that we don't have some other fancy vacation planned my family goes to Myrtle Beach with my Dad's parents (aka Grandma & Grandad D, not to be confused with the aforementioned Grammy and Grandad C) because they have a timeshare that sleeps six and there's only two of them. So we basically stay in this really nice resort for free. Since we've been going here for so long we like to find new things to do.

One year (I was about 13 or so) my Mom, who has this fetish with lighthouses, decides that she wants to go on a seashell collecting lighthouse boat adventure thing. Kelly can never do anything alone so I get dragged along. This tour-a-ma-jig is in Georgia so we have to wake up at the asscrack of dawn and drive several hours to get there. I was not a happy camper.

So we arrive in Georgia and get on this rinky-dink boat with about 15 other tourists. We motor out to this teeny island with an ugly lighthouse on it. This particular island is located where a river meets an ocean and the only visitors are the people that go on these twice a day tours so it apparently has some gorgeous seashells. Mom also has an obsession with seashells.

The tour guide people tell us we have an hour and a half to go exploring but we have to be back on time. Mom and I split up and go searching for shells. This island is shaped like a 'U' with the boat moored at the bottom. I make it all the way up one side and then turn back. As I make my way back to the boat I pass Mom, who is busy collecting shells. I make a point to tell her that she'd better turn back now or she might not make it to the boat on time. Kelly is one of the most chronically late people on the planet so I already know that shit is going down.

I make it back to the boat with 10 minutes to spare. It is 1:50pm. We are supposed to be back at 2pm. As the minutes tick by more and more people arrive back at the boat. At 2:03pm just guess who the one person not back is? Yeah, my mom.

2:10pm: I start to worry

2:20pm: I'm getting nervous.

2:25pm: We can finally see Mom as a speck in the distance.

2:35pm: Mom is significantly closer to the boat but still pretty far. The boat driver/tour guide guys are getting pissed.

2:40pm: Boat driver guy decides to leave--without my mom. I plead with him to just wait a little longer, but he's adamant. At this point, the other tourists on the boat have sort of realized what is going on. I'm nearly in tears because I'm 13 and about to be stuck in a Georgia marina for several hours until the second tour comes back with Mom in tow and I have no money and no cell phone and this is a flippin' life crisis. The boat driver starts to prepare the boat to leave until this one guy jumps up and says in a Texas drawl, "I am a lawyer, and if you leave this little girl's mother I will sue!" I am absolutely mortified, but slightly relieved that the boat driver has opted to argue with Lawyer Man instead of driving off without my mom.

2:50pm: Kelly FINALLY makes it back to the boat. Only fifty minutes late. I spend the return boat trip sitting as far away from her as possible to make our relationship less evident.

Turns out that Mom was so ridiculously late because she kept seeing conch shells washing up in the waves. Some of Kelly's favorite things ever are complete conch shells. I mean, yeah the shells she brought back were beautiful, but she left me hanging on a boat with a hostile boat driver and a litigation-happy tourist for some goddamn seashells. Thanks Mom, glad to see where your priorities lie.

It might have been the same week of the Seashell Incident or the next year (can't remember) when Kelly dragged me to the antiques store. Another one of Kelly's fav things are antiques (other things she enjoys are jewelry, Christmas ornaments, shoes, reality tv, vacations, and smutty romance novels). She is especially enamored with 1950s era dresses that Leave It To Beaver type mothers wore back in the day. This giant antiques superstore place just happens to have a whole rack of them. She decides she wants to try them on.

Since I guess people don't normally have to try on antiques this place has no dressing room. There is however, a single unisex bathroom that we are welcome to use to try these dresses on. We get in this bathroom and she tries on the first dress. She manages to get it on over her head and with some wiggling down to where one might normally wear a dress. The zipper, sewn on the side armpit, is in no way getting zipped. She is just too big. She then attempts to remove the dress by pulling it over her head. Instead she gets the dress stuck on her ample bosom.

Now, I wear a 38C and I have the smallest boobs in my family. Kelly is the proud owner of a large rack of 36DDs. Picture this: we are in this teeny bathroom. My Mom is stuck in this dress with her arms pinned above her head and the dress shrouding her face. I thought it was pretty damn funny. She does not think it is nearly as amusing and demands I come help her. It only takes about a minute to get the first dress off.

Instead of learning her lesson, Kelly is holding out that the other dress she brought in will fit. I don't understand why she thinks she could fit into dresses handmade for other, much smaller women, but who am I to judge. She forces herself into the second dress--which does fit slightly better since we can zip this one up most of the way--but it is still pretty tight. In her attempt to get this dress off she gets stuck again, except this time she gets really stuck. I don't even understand how she got it on in the first place. I start laughing again, but try to help her out. The dress won't budge. It is really hard to get someone out of a vintage dress without ripping the stupid thing. But anyway, five minutes later we are still trying to get her unstuck (she was in the same arms-over-head face-covered-in-dress-fabric scenario) when there is an insistent knock on the door. Somebody apparently has to use the bathroom pretty badly. The added complication of a person waiting to use the bathroom we are currently in makes me laugh harder.

Mom and I continue to struggle with the dress, meanwhile the lady outside the door sounds like she's about to pee her pants in bladder agony. I'm about to pee my own pants inside the bathroom because I'm laughing so hard. We finally get the dress off, after much wiggling and huffing and puffing and tugging. As we exit the bathroom the waiting lady shoots us a dirty look and make a beeline for the toilet. I continue to laugh about this for several hours and I am sure to recount the whole story for the rest of my family.

Disney World

When I was in 5th grade my family took our first trip to Most Magical Place on Earth. I was uuber excited because this was like the first time ever that I'd gotten to skip school for anything remotely cool. Plus I'm 11 and 11 year olds always flip their shit for Disney World.

Long story short, we went to Disney World for 10 days and kept a god-awful packed schedule that Kelly drummed up. On our second to last night there, Grandad (Steve) woke up in the middle of the night having an asthma attack. He was also having chest pain so at 3am we had to call the ambulance. After getting to the hospital, they discover that Steve has three blocked arteries and they schedule him for an angioplasty. Grammy and Grandad had to stay in Florida for an extra two weeks.

The second time we went to Disney World we stayed in this really nice resort place. There was a day that we left unscheduled and were all taking naps when the fire alarms start screeching. We all freak out and evacuate the building. Turns out a couple of kids in the room below us were playing Pirates with some Peter Pan swords and accidentally hit the sprinkler head, causing the entire room--and the two rooms below it--to flood. Thankfully we dodged a bullet on this one.

Rehobeth DE

Labor Day Weekend a couple years ago.

Mom, who lives--and I seriously mean lives--for vacations of any sort, convinces me to go to the beach with her for the weekend. Dad and Danny were off galavanting with the Boy Scouts or something and she was not having any of that left-behind shit. Carly came with us because her aunt was letting us stay in their gated community beach house. We ended up leaving really late (like 9pm) because Kelly can't be on time for anything. Not that we were on any schedule, but it takes several hours to drive there and I really didn't want to get there obscenely late.

We finally arrive at the house (after getting a bit lost) and park in the driveway. We get the house key from the secret code key hiding place thing, and go to open the door. The key fits in the front door lock but it won't turn. We grab some flashlights from the car to get a better view of the lock. Now, it's almost one in the morning. We are grouped up at the front door with flashlights. We probably look like a group of really bad burglers. I'm actually surprised there weren't cops patrolling the neighborhood because I'm sure we looked like Probable Cause on a platter.

After an hour of attempted to break ourselves in to the house, we realize there is no hope and that we're going to have to sleep in the minivan. We literally laugh ourselves silly at the absurdity of the situation. But there's nothing we can do about it until the service center opens at 10am the next morning.

The next morning we hit up McDonald's for breakfast, and then hit the hardware store for some WD-40. We lubricate the fuck out of that lock, but it's still a no-go. Finally 10am rolls around and we go to the maintenance office. We explain our plight to the secretary, who laughs at us. When the guy with the spare keys finally gets there, he takes one look at us lounging on the waiting room couches and goes, "Are you the car sleepers?"

(Turns out that somebody had previously tried to break into the house and had broken some of the tumblers in the front door lock. I maintain that if we had only gotten there earlier we would have figured this out much sooner and could have managed to get in the house that night.)

Hawaii

In the summer of 2008 my family + Grandma/Grandad D + my aunt/uncle/2 cousins went on a two week Hawaiian vacation. We were taking a weeklong island hopping cruise and then staying a week in Kauai. Every day we stopped at a different island to do excursions. On our second day on the cruise we went snorkeling. Dumbass Kelly, who is diabetic and has an insulin pump, forgot to remove it before jumping into the Pacific, and thus snorkeled with it on for several hours before she realized she completely obliterated the circuitry on it.

Insulin pumps take the place of daily insulin shots. With her pump out of commission, Mom had to give herself insulin shots for the first time in nearly 15 years. Problem is, she didn't bring any needles. This resulted in an emergency trip to the only WalMart in Hawaii to buy syringes en masse. Only my family would have to go to WalMart to buy needles. People probably thought we were heroin addicts or something. Also happening during this time was Mom trying to get in touch with MiniMed (the pump manufacturer) so that they could send her a new pump. Now, we are on an island hopping cruise in a completely different time zone from the one in California (where Minimed HQ is). The company ended up having to send the package to three different Hawaiian islands before we finally intercepted it. The package would make it to the island we were on, but it wouldn't get to the pick up point before we had to return to this ship and I'll be damned if I'm getting left on a relatively remote tropical paradise because UPS fails at life. Kelly didn't end up getting her new pump until Tuesday of the second week.

Cooperstown, NY

The Family Vacation of 2007 was a trip to Cooperstown, NY to see Cal Ripken Jr. get inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. My Dad is a baseball fanatic, and only a baseball fanatic would make his wife plan a vacation like this six years in advance.

The first problem with this vacation was our hotel. Because Kelly was so worried about getting a place close enough to Cooperstown, and because she booked this hotel more than a year in advance, we ended up staying over an hour away from the damn town. In a Holiday Inn Express. Holiday Inn Expresses are not meant to house a family of four for an entire week. They are meant for people who are on the express. They were also never meant to house the luggage of the likes of someone like Kelly.

My family of four drives a seven passenger minivan. For family vacations we put a cartop carrier on the roof of it. It doesn't matter if we're staying for the weekend or a week, this vehicle is always packed to the brim. It's not my fault, because I generally pack my suitcase, a backpack or laptop bag, and a purse. And it's not Danny's fault, because he packs less than I do. It's Kelly's fault (what else is new?). She generally packs: the largest suitcase (she shares it with Dad), a bathroom bag, backpack, purse, laptop bag, shoe bag, pillows, jackets, and any other odds and ends she thinks we have the potential to need (she's a 'you never know' kind of packer).

Between the luggage of all four of us, there is barely room to move. The room consists of two queen sized beds, a tv, a single dresser, a couch chair, and the bathroom. There's an outdoor pool, but it only goes to 5ft and it's really lame. This place sucks.

The first day we're there we drive up to Cooperstown to go the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum. I didn't really mind, first of all because I kind of dig history, and second of all because I wanted to get a look around. I was in the museum for about an hour and forty-five minutes. Kelly, Mike, and Danny were in the museum for over four hours. I wanted to kill myself. Like most other things, Kelly is fascinated with history so when you take her to a museum be prepared to stay awhile because she will read every goddamn plaque and infocard in there. But only three hours was in the actual museum; they spent the rest of the time in the giftshop.

In the drive to get there I got a good look at the place and I realized I was doomed: every single thing in the town of Cooperstown is baseball related. Everything. Even the post office uses baseball themed stamps. I generally don't mind sports (I actually played t-ball as a kid), but I do have a level of saturation and Cooperstown definitely exceeded that level. Kelly and I had sort of planned on going off to do some shopping or something but where the hell were we going to go? Denied.

Even worse, the HIE where we stayed was in Jamestown, NY. There was a Peebles, a really rickity movie theater (there were actual springs still in the cushions), a Subway, and that was pretty much it. Jamestown was pretty much Hell on Earth as far as 17-year-old me was concerned. One night we decided to go and find the closest WalMart, just for something to do (my life hit a new low). It was 45 minutes away.

So basically the options are to A) drive to Cooperstown or B) sit in the hotel room. And once Kelly and I had explored CTown on the first day, we both knew that there really wasn't much for us to do. And by 'not much' I mean nothing. Mike ended up renting an extra car so that he and Danny could go to CTown and Mom and I could go do other way better things. This didn't amount to much, since the most exciting thing we did was drive around until we found Saratoga Springs (it's beautiful up there, by the way).

Mind you, this is our family vacation. On family vacations you're supposed to spend time together as a family. Lies. This turned into Dad's vacation with the rest of us along for the ride. Ask him, and he'll tell you it's the best vacation he's ever had. Literally, he spent the entire week with a childlike grin on his face. But for the rest of us it was utterly miserable. To make things worse, we didn't even get to go to Myrtle Beach that year because the Hall of Fame Induction and Grandma/Grandad's vacation overlapped. Suckiest Vacation Ever.