Not Quite a Vacation

The kids are on their second week of school, but the same end-of-summer small talk with other moms still occurs. I’m approached with…

“Ugh, I’m so glad that school has started and that we’re back on a schedule, aren’t you?” I smile in validation, all the while thinking, Nope, I’m not glad. I hate it.

“My kids got to do some really cool camps! Like baseball, and drama, and dance, and…” Camps? Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of those… Tried ‘em a few times. Not a fan. I have to drive there, and then home, and then back again to pick them up, and then back home. That’s like school. I just want to go to the beach with my kids and eat hotdogs and ice cream.

“Hey! I saw the pics on Facebook of your amazing vacation! How was it?!” (Screech!) Wait, what? Did you just say “vacation?”

Kevin had a professor in graduate school, a family man, who taught us that there is a distinct different between vacations and family trips, and the two should never be confused. Ever. The difference? Basically, children. One includes them, and the other does not. He was an electrical engineering professor; therefore, a man of logic, reasoning, and efficiency, and he must be correct. He has thought about it, come to a hypothesis, tested it, and found it to be true. So. He’s right.

I will admit, we had an amazing family trip this summer. Two and a half weeks of exhausting adventure, driving from the Pacific Northwest coast to San Diego. We explored Snoqualmie Falls and braved the glass floor from the top of the Space Needle in Seattle. We met up for a family reunion on the Oregon Coast, looking for sea stars and anemones in the tidepools around the majestic Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach and letting our Florida toes barely touch the icy ocean water while our Utah cousins dove in to body surf. We climbed the Astoria Column, played in the snow still surrounding Crater Lake, visited my grandparents’ old house in Grants Pass, walked through sacred Redwood Forests, skipped rocks on the Smith River, drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, ate ice cream at Ghirardelli Square, watched the sea otters and admired the crashing waves around Morro Rock, and then spent another week with family in San Diego.

The pictures are awesome, the memories priceless. But, no, it was not a vacation.

We also had our credit card number stolen two days before we left-- had to cancel them. We wouldn’t get our new cards in time for our flight, so I had them mailed to my parents’ home in San Diego. “No worries,” we said. “We’ll just use our debit card.” We didn’t anticipate that the rental car company wouldn’t accept debit cards as a holding card for the minivan, even though we had already paid for the it. They weren’t going to give us the van until Kevin pulled out his wallet and said, with some reservation, “We could use my corporate card...” Problem solved.

Then in Tacoma, the hotel I booked was… well… one of those hotels. You know, the ones where more people are living there than staying there? I realized what kind it was when we pulled up to check in, and there was a kids’ scooter sitting out front alongside a skateboard, their owners a group of kids just hanging out in the lobby shootin’ the breeze with the desk clerk. I chuckled and thought, Oh, boy… Our non-smoking room reeked of cigarette smoke, Kevin ran into a domestic dispute almost turned violent (until he intervened) on his way to the front desk to pick up a can of Lysol air freshener, I couldn’t sleep because I heard yelling and foul language all night long, and we could only eat our free continental breakfast if we brought a voucher proving we were staying in that hotel and were eligible to eat it.

The following week in California, my oldest daughter came to me wondering if she had eczema on her scalp. Oh, no, I panicked, and rushed over to check her head. Lice. Are you freaking kidding me?! I checked her two sisters, and they had it, too, just not as bad. We put their hair in French braids, and continued with our plans that day to meet up with my sister-in-law and her kids, having made sure to warn her of our plague. She was gracious and understanding, and didn’t seem worried. Once we made it to Morro Bay that evening, we stopped at a drugstore to get lice treatment, and spent the next two hours combing out their hair in the hotel room.

The next morning, I received a text from our bank notifying me of suspicious purchases of digital items on Amazon with our debit card. My debit card number had been stolen, too! I reported it immediately, and the card was cancelled. And then we had no money—no credit card, no debit card, and I had used most of the cash I had in my wallet to buy some little mediocre painting from a “starving” street artist in San Francisco the day before. I only had four dollars in my wallet. In desperation, we ate the granola bars we had in the car for breakfast as we drove to our bank’s nearest branch twenty minutes away to take care of the problem.

By the time we arrived to my parents’ house in San Diego, I was spent. I declared that I didn’t want to do anything or go anywhere for the whole week. For the most part, that’s what we did—nothing. The kids played in the backyard on the giant tree swing, ran around with their cousin, watched an unhealthy number of movies, and organized their annual lemonade stand.

And when we got home, I needed a vacation from our family trip.

By the looks of things, that may not come for a while.