It's happened again. (cue Jaws theme....da dum, da dum.)
My family nightmare vacation was a complete train wreck. Oh sure, I had a few good times, a smattering of fun amongst the chaos. But the majority of the whole debacle was a flippin disastrous kerbobble of "holy crap get me out of here!" ness.
Let me start out by saying that the very beginning of the thing was plagued by terror and and angst. Yes, I said plagued. We had planned to leave on Friday, July 19th. We were going to fit 7 people into my sister's Minivan and head to new jersey to pick up my son - who was at Ocean Grove with his father's side of the family. Then we were to head down to South Carolina for a family reunion. Sounds easy enough, right?
Well, you would be completely, totally and utterly wrong. You see, the Minivan is my sister's van, and she had offered to take me, my mother, my son and my brother along with herself and her 3
So instead of renting a car with just the first 4 of us, we decide to depend on the stability of the plan to use the minivan. Big mistake. My sister's semi-psycho husband finds out about the plan and gets all ticked off because it turns out he can get those darned college teachers to give him the time off for something as amazing and special as a family reunion with his precious wife and darling children. Huh. Right. And before you hummina wha? me - this man is pretty much an asshat to his wife most of the time. Doing things which I will not mention here, because a lot of it is unmentionable. The few things I can mention are these: He spent that entire week yelling, threatening to slash the tires in the van, taking the license plates and trying to bend them up - all so we can't go, because my sister is going without him.
Anyway, because of Nut Job, we come up with this cuckoo plan to sneak away a day earlier while he is at school. And then, to be really clever - we decide to double cross our double cross by leaving a whole 3 days earlier - just in case. We thought we were so awesome. I ask my exhausted and lethargic sister when Nut Job is in class this week, and she says Wednesday. So we plan to leave Wednesday. Then she tells me she was wrong and it's Tuesday. So we plan to leave Tuesday. My mother scrambles to find people to cover her shifts at Pizza Hut, I run around packing like a Tasmanian devil in heat, and my brother does what he does best and says "eh, whatever" to the whole thing. Then the sister calls back and says she's wrong, Nut Job has college on Wednesday. After a long moment - during which I seriously considered throwing my sister into oncoming traffic - we decide to leave on Tuesday anyway. Because what the hell, vacation is fun and you should make it a really long one when you're packed into a minivan like sardines with lots of small children and 2 semi invalids and one crazy mess of a woman. And my mother.
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| This is what it took to pack up that van. Every few days. |
So, Monday, while Nut Job is at college, we super fast pack all the stuff we can and bring it to my house. The theory was that we would have all the stuff here, so that we could quickly pack the car on Tuesday morning. My sister says she'll show at about 10 am. So I spend the entire night worrying about if we are going to be able to leave or not. The next day, I text my sister at about 10:30, "???". She replies that she needs more time and she doesn't know how to get away from Nut Job. I tell her to figure it out, since she has a set of her own brains, because at this point I don't know what to say and if NJ will even believe any of it. She finally shows up at 2 pm, and says she told him that she was going to try and do a practice "pack up" of the van, since he spent all week whining about how 8 people would never fit in the van, and it was illegal. (It wasn't - we called the police and checked) I thought that was the most obvious lie in the history of lies, but hey - we finally got in the car and got it packed and on the road. We ninja pick up my mother, and I have to go 20 miles in the opposite direction to give my husband money for work and say goodbye. At 4 pm, we aren't even on the road and my sister wants to take this kids to say goodbye to their dad. Let me give you a small example of what the texts are like: (S is my sister, NJ is the Nut Job husband)
NJ: Where the @&*! are you?
NJ: If you come back here for anything I"m going to slash the #($^@)^ tires.
NJ: I love you
NJ: I just want to see the kids and say goodbye
S: leave me alone
NJ: #($^ you.
NJ: I love you
NJ: I just miss you
NJ: It's my (*&@^$( van bring it back
NJ: I'm calling the cops
S: we'll see you in a week, if you hadn't been such an *^& I would have brought the kids to say goodbye
NJ: $&@^ you
And that would have been a 2 minute text-conversation. All that in 2 minutes. It's rather sad. Anyhoo....we veto the saying goodbye thing, based on the aforementioned text/conversation and we hit the road. We find out Nut Job is on the road as well, looking for us. We get stuck in traffic right outside of our town, and we don't breathe a sigh of relief until about 50 miles later, when we know he must have given up and stopped trying to find us.
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| this is what we all felt like |
Officially on our way to Atlantic City.
End of part one. (I'm serious - it was that stressful from the get go.)
