Houston, We Have A Nightmare

by Doug Kaufman

Family vacation. In kids, the words inspire visions of relaxing days at the beach, exciting trips to amusement parks and educational visits to museums.

In adults, the words typically inspire fear. For the Better Half and myself, one recent family vacation envisioned as a meticulously orchestrated getaway soon plunged to depths that would have made Chevy Chase cringe.

Oh, it started well enough. A week’s vacation to a condo on the coast of North Carolina with friends and their young children seemed to be the perfect way to relax, refresh and share expenses. They had a van. We had a car. We decided to split up who hauled what to make it an easy trip for all involved.

On the night before leaving, weeks of planning had us comfortably confident that we had left nothing to chance. Our itinerary had us loading up, moving out and hitting the highway as a caravan at precisely noon on Friday. We would then arrive at our stopover hotel no later than 6 p.m., enjoy a relaxing evening swimming, and complete our journey the next morning following a soothing night’s rest.

My first warning sign should have been obvious. Although our week at the condo began on June 14^th, our vacation actually began on Friday. Because I had never been superstitious, the fact that we were starting out on Friday the 13^th didn’t bother me at all.

Do you remember the scene in the movie Apollo 13 when, early in the flight, an engine burned out prematurely? Captain James "Tom Hanks" Lovell made the comment, "Well, there goes our glitch for this flight." As it turns out, that trip also started on Friday the 13^th. I know how Lovell, Haise and Swigert felt.

The day started well and we were all eager to get going. Right before 1 p.m., when we were already behind schedule, I found my wife still trying to pack the car. Since that’s one of the things men do extremely well, I told her to let me take over. "Don’t worry. I’m good at this. Everything will fit," I assured her.

"Yeah," she said suspiciously. "Just don’t forget to put the cooler in the back seat so we can have drinks and snacks along the way."

At least that’s what she says she said. I was too busy making sure that every square inch of trunk space was filled. When I had finished shoehorning just about everything we owned into the trunk, I marched into the house and started barking orders. "Everyone in the car! We’re late! Let’s MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!"

We buckled in, I put the car in reverse, gave a shout of triumph, hit the gas…and backed over the cooler, scattering its contents across the driveway. Gathering the surviving remnants into another cooler – and taking great care not to look at the Better Half – I gently suggested that maybe she could have noticed the cooler wasn’t in the back seat when she buckled the baby seat in. She responded to my suggestion by gently shouting, "YOU WILL NOT RUIN MY VACATION ANY MORE!!!!"

Luckily, she didn’t seem to be in the mood to continue her lecture. Her anger and the twitch forming in my eye began to fade and we started to get lost in conversations about the beach. This Friday the 13^th jinx, I thought, is beaten. We had our glitch – and we had gotten through it relatively unscathed.

We were young, we were naïve, but we really should have known better than to tempt fate. A wrong turn on the West Virginia Turnpike, a subsequent U-turn in the median strip, followed by a flat tire caused by a nail picked up in said median, were followed by an unsuccessful attempt to quickly retrieve the spare tire from deep within my meticulously packed trunk. What we thought had been problems before we left the house quickly paled in comparison. Topped off by an incident involving the snack crumb-covered faces of our children and a hyperactive Chihuahua at the hotel, a more cynical reader might say that, like Apollo 13, our trip to the Carolina Coast was a successful failure. Except that mission never made it to its destination and the Better Half wasn’t going home until she too had splashed down in the ocean. And by the time that happened, the exhausting experiences of Friday the 13^th had long faded.

Since then, I wouldn’t say that our planning has gotten any less precise, but our expectations of what constitutes success have certainly fallen. Now, if no one gets sick from eating pecan waffles at the Pancake Hut, we consider it a great vacation.

Doug Kaufman lives in Tallmadge with his wife Renee and their three vacation-ready children. Plans for this summer’s vacations are still in development.