Family Vacation V. 2009: Lessons Learned, Part I

I, along with 14 of my kids, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, recently returned from a week in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. (Yes, like shopping in bulk, vacationing in bulk is cheaper. That's why we do it.) Like my father, I am a horrible, anal traveler who insists that vacation is not merely about relaxation and fun; it is about new experiences, and learning new things. So as I recap every vacation I take, I like to reflect on those things that I came to learn on that trip, that I did not know before I took the trip. This post will chronicle two of the five most important things learned that week; I'll cover more in my next post.

1. Driving Miss Daisy will drive you crazy. Especially when you're driving two Miss Daisies and a Mr. Miss Daisy. Our house rental began on Saturday with a 4 p.m. check-in. Resisting the obvious delights of spending eight hours straight in a car with the children, we decided to break up the trip and leave Friday evening around 8 p.m., drive till midnight, and stop overnight at the halfway point of Salisbury, MD. The grands -- Mr. and Mr. Mr. Monopoly, Aunt Dora, and Uncle Big Eddie -- perhaps recognizing that an eight-hour stint in the enclosed environs of a 1999 Toyota Camry bears uncomfortable similarity to eternity in a coffin, opted to do the same. That is, if you define "do the same" to mean "make us drive them." NotClooney got my father and our two boys; I got the rest. In the 1999 Toyota Camry.

So apparently, The Old do two things in abundance: pee and snack. (But not simultaneously, as far as I could tell, though I didn't follow anyone into a stall.) They brought with them corn chips, peanuts, Doritos, pretzels, and candy, and they munched, crunched, and sucked, loudly, throughout the remainder of New Jersey, into Delaware, and straight through to Salisbury, MD. They subsequently burped a lot. Meanwhile, Uncle Big Eddie incessantly played with the GPS, cranking the volume (I guess to drown out the munching, crunching, sucking, and burping) so that every fifteen minutes or so, a vaguely British computerized female voice bellowed at me, in oddly clipped tones, "IN. POINT. FIVE. MILES. TURN. RIGHT!" Of course, the GPS also screamed "OK, RECALCULATING!" quite a bit, since we continuously knocked her off course by pulling over at rest areas every 50 miles or so. We'd barely made it out of Central Jersey before The Old requested the first pit stop, regardless of the fact that absolutely no liquids were being consumed during the otherwise-Bacchanalian back seat feeding frenzy.

And yet I soldiered on, through corn chip crumbs and shady-looking truck stop toilets, despite a constant caterwaul of "AT.END.OF.EXIT.BEAR.LEFT!" to arrive at the Best Western in Salisbury, MD around 1 a.m. I pulled up to the entrance to let The Old grab their overnight bags and enter before I parked in the nether regions of the lot. It did not, however, occur to me that one of The Old had not had the foresight to pack a small overnight bag for the long-planned midpoint break, instead stuffing all his clean undies, as well as numerous, complicated denture care implements and applications, into his regular suitcase, which was of course at the bottom of the bursting-at-the-seams trunk. And those clean undies and denture care implements and applications of Uncle Big Eddie's? They were of course at the bottom of his bursting-at-the-seams suitcase that was at the bottom of the bursting-at-the-seams trunk of the 1999 Toyota Coffin. So at some point, while he unpacked every last godforsaken piece of everything, I began hallucinating or something, because after about ten minutes, I just started driving to a parking spot. With Uncle Big Eddie still hanging out of the trunk. Ooops. Thankfully, I'd barely dragged him five feet before the rest of the two carloads of vacationers shrieked me back into consciousness. Clearly, I needed sleep.

It was not to be. The Best Western in Salisbury, MD, at 1 a.m. on Saturday, August 1, only had king rooms left -- each with one admittedly rather large bed, but one bed nonetheless. I rejoined the NotClooney boys only to find myself stuffed among them like Grandpa George, Grandma Georgina, Grandpa Joe, and Grandma Josephine. I was in no condition to drive the next morning, but luckily, after a good night's sleep with only Aunt Dora sharing his king-sized bed and with faux choppers in place and pearly white, Uncle Big Eddie was in fine shape to transport The Old the rest of the way to North Carolina, despite his near-death experience.

2. If your children witness your attempts at vehicular homicide, they may emulate them. I generally try to display upstanding citizenship around my children, setting a good example by not, for instance, smoking, shooting up, returning library books late, or murdering old men with a car. And when I do slip up in their presence, like that one time I almost murdered Uncle Big Eddie with a car (see above), I am usually heartened that they are still quite young and have plenty of time to forget my bad lesson, while I have plenty of time to smother said bad lesson with untold demonstrations of quality behavior. For example, neither of my children will be driving a car anytime soon, so the risk of their remembering, and then modeling, my attempted vehicular homicide is quite low. Or so I thought.

I had no idea children are allowed to pilot Jet Skis. More pointedly, I had no idea that anyone in my family was insane enough to (a) let either of my kids pilot a Jet Ski, or (2) then hop on the back of a Jet Ski piloted by one of my kids! It seems Gross Uncle Gary, the one afternoon The Heir was in his charge, proved himself to be, in fact, that insane. Now, The Heir most assuredly was not purposely trying to kill Gross Uncle Gary, who was, after all, a professional hockey player and remains a hockey coach and program manager. Furthermore, he never, ever yells at the kids for picking their noses or farting in public. In sum, Gross Uncle Gary is the adult in The Heir's life most worthy of mindless adulation, not death. Nonetheless, he lasted about 18 seconds on the back of The Heir's Jet Ski before The Heir took a turn way too fast. I must say, Gross Uncle Gary flies through the air with the greatest of ease.

And so, after all this excitement so early in our trip, you'd think I'd have nothing more to report about one little family vacation, wouldn't you? But you'd be wrong. In the meantime, let us know in the comments if you have gone or are going on vacation this summer, where, with whom -- and what you learned. And don't get in between any old people and their Doritos.