It was the summer of 2007, and my parents thought that it would be a brilliant idea to go on afamilyroad trip to some unknown location. This was the summer before I started high school and I wasn’t in the family bonding mood for a day let alone two weeks. With me being an only child, grandchild, and great grandchild, I was the only kid with five adults in a minivan. Why my parents thought that this was a good idea is still beyond my imagination. The trip started off like any other hectic family vacation, full of last minute packing and arguing.
None of us had any idea as to where we would end up, but as I was told repeatedly, it was all part of the adventure. We got about three hours in, and what happens? We get in an accident. Not just an accident, a wreck. The whole front of the van was smashed in. After all of the paperwork was filled out and the car was towed off, we had to get a rental. The rental car really wasn’t that bad. It was a Cadillac Escalade, but the only pain was having to unload and then reload our luggage into the SUV.
We eventually just stayed the night about an hour out from where the accident had occurred. We all figured that after something ridiculous like wreck happens, our trip could only go up. The next few days would show us that we were sadly mistaken. The next morning, we woke up at the crack of dawn to get on the road. I fell asleep in the car and when I woke up, we were in Richmond, VA. We all thought that it would be a good time to stop for lunch, so we did. It was a small fish house on the outskirts of Richmond and it had the best corn chowder on the planet.
Half way through lunch, my mother decides that she would like to go look outside. Now, I come from a background of rather ungraceful and uncoordinated people. My mother just so happens to be the worst of us all. As she stands, she seems to take the entire tablecloth with her as well as ourfood. This then dumps our entire lunch on everyone but her. This still is not the last of the misfortunate events to occur on this fun family adventure. We finally arrived a few days later to our surprise location of Rye, NH.
It was a very small quaint town on the east side of Portsmouth. We ended up renting a condo that overlooked the Atlantic and it was absolutely beautiful. That night, we decided to go out and look around this serene location which we had stopped at. Come to find out, there really wasn’t much to Rye so we traveled down to Portsmouth. We ate dinner, went shopping, got ice cream and finally arrived back at our condo around ten. The best part about that night? The fact that no one remembered there key thinking that surely someone else would bring theirs.
Every locksmith in town was closed so we ended up sleeping in the Escalade. The family adventure of ‘ 07 turned out to be so much more than what any of us had bargained for. Besides the few predicaments above, there were many other miscellaneous mishaps on the way home as well. However, as crazy as that trip may have been, I had more fun on that vacation than any other. It was definitely the most memorable and through all of that, we grew a thousand times closer. I wouldn’t have traded that summer for anything.