Six people. A week’s worth of luggage. One dying air conditioner. One disintegrating tooth. Four hundred sewing pins. And several hundred miles of family… togetherness.
There is a moment before every family vacation when you still believe it was a good idea. For us, that moment usually occurs sometime before we actually leave the driveway. We were headed to Myrtle Beach for a whole week. The beach. The ocean. Eating out. Getting away from the house. Making memories with the kids. Spending all the quality time together, as a family! You know. Vacation. All we had to do was get there.
Now, there are six of us, and apparently going away for one week requires bringing enough supplies to establish a moderately successful colony. Clothes, shoes, beach stuff, toiletries, snacks, electronics, chargers for the electronics, and chargers for things that I don’t remember owning but somebody insists absolutely must come with us. And all of this had to fit inside our Ford Transit Connect. The Transit Connect is technically a van. I say technically because Ford apparently looked at a minivan one day and said, “What if we made this considerably smaller and then encouraged people to put seven human beings in it?”
By the time we finished packing, every available cubic inch had been filled. There were bags under feet, behind seats, between children, and probably in places Ford never intended cargo to go, (like the space under the speakers in the wall.) But we got everybody in. The doors closed. Mostly.
That’s when we found the sewing pins.
Apparently Logan had, at some point before the trip, had brought roughly 400 sewing pins to put into the van seats. I don’t know why. There are questions you ask as a parent because you genuinely want an answer too, and then there are questions when you’ve been doing this long enough to know that the answer will only make things worse. This was the a question of the later variety. The important thing is when we discovered them: after everyone had already been shoved into the van seats.
You see, nothing quite prepares a family for vacation like settling into an already overpacked vehicle and discovering that one of your children has apparently converted the upholstery into a medieval defensive structure.
So while driving to our relaxing family vacation, we had to conduct what amounted to a mine-clearing operation. We picked sewing pins out of seats, checked the seats again, checked the children, checked the seats one more time because there were FOUR HUNDRED OF THEM, and eventually decided we’d probably found enough that nobody was going to require a tetanus shot before leaving Virginia.
Then we left.
All True Vacation Begins at Buc-ee’s
At some point on the journey, we stopped at Buc-ee’s. Because if you pass a Buc-ee’s with four children and don’t stop, I’m pretty sure Texas sends someone (Walker Texas Ranger) to revoke your parental rights.
Everybody got food, and Kara got a brisket sandwich. Now, Buc-ee’s brisket has many wonderful qualities. It’s smoky. It’s delicious. It’s tender. Apparently it is also capable of creating dental work.
Kara took one bite, and part of her tooth fell out.
Not biting an ice cube. Not chewing a jawbreaker. Not doing some inexplicable kid thing involving a Lego. Brisket.
I don’t know whether that says something concerning about Kara’s tooth or something deeply impressive about Buc-ee’s brisket. Either way, we were only trying to get to vacation and had already suffered our first casualty.
Kara: 0. Buc-ee’s brisket: 1.
The Back-Seat Peace Process
Meanwhile, Slayden and Moira were discovering new and increasingly creative reasons to argue with each other.
They argued about touching too much. They argued about not touching enough. They argued about who had what, who was sitting where, who was doing something, who wasn’t doing something, and whatever other international crises could be manufactured inside approximately four square feet of Transit Connect.
At one point, Moira became genuinely angry because Slayden was looking at her.
“DAD! Slayden is looking at me!”
There are moments in fatherhood where you begin formulating a response and realize halfway through that you have no idea what civilization expects from you.
What’s the ruling here? I thought, “what would Ghandi say… Stop looking at your sister? Or Maybe Jesus had a better answer…Look somewhere else? I settled with the always functional…Everyone close your eyes until South Carolina?
And naturally, if Slayden stopped paying attention to her, there was apparently a reasonable chance this would also constitute an offense. They had reached the point where both too much interaction and insufficient interaction were acts of aggression.
From the driver’s seat, I employed the same sophisticated conflict-resolution strategy fathers have used for generations: “Both of you knock it off.” This normally produced somewhere between eleven and seventeen seconds of peace before somebody looked at somebody wrong again. And remember, there was nowhere to retreat. Around them, behind them, under them and practically on top of them was a week’s worth of our earthly possessions. Six people had been compressed into a small van with enough luggage to invade a moderately sized country.
Thats when… the air conditioner quit.
My Transit Chooses Violence
I’d like to point out that we were driving south. In summer. Toward Myrtle Beach.
This is not the portion of the United States where you want your air conditioner to suddenly discover work-life balance.
Cold air became cool air. Cool air became suspiciously warm air. Eventually the vents were basically just blowing warm encouragement puffs.
The temperature outside was approximately the surface of the sun with one billion percent humidity, and inside our little rolling storage unit were six people, a week’s worth of baggage, two children arguing about whether they were paying the correct amount of attention to each other, one child whose lunch had just caused an emergency dental visit, and the lingering possibility that we’d missed sewing pin number 397.
So we rolled down the windows.
This did not help.
Rolling down the windows in Southern summer humidity doesn’t cool the vehicle. It just lets you experience the weather faster. Hot air poured through the van. Everything became sticky. The children became stickier. I became stickier. I’m pretty sure the luggage started sweating.
At highway speed, the Transit Connect had effectively transformed from a small family van into a convection oven.
And still we drove south.
Because we were going on vacation, come hell, or high humidity point.
Then I Got Sunburned
Here’s something nobody warns you about when the air conditioner quits and you have to drive for hours with the windows down: the sun knows where you are.
Specifically, it knows where your left arm is.
Ill paint the picture for you, there I was, driving toward Myrtle Beach with my arm sitting beside the window, slowly roasting like a gas-station hot dog. I didn’t notice at first because I was a little preoccupied. There was traffic in front of me, the air conditioner had surrendered, Slayden and Moira were one sideways glance away from another Vietnam, Kara’s tooth had been defeated by smoked beef, and somewhere buried beneath a week’s worth of luggage was presumably sunscreen.
Which, in retrospect, would have been useful. By the time we finally arrived, I looked down at my arm.
Red.
I had gotten sunburned driving to the beach.
I had not been to the beach. I had not put on swim trunks. I had not sat beside a pool. I had not stepped into the Atlantic Ocean. I had not even begun the portion of the vacation where a reasonable human being might expect to receive a sunburn.
And I already had one.
We had made it to Myrtle Beach. Logan had booby-trapped the van with approximately 400 sewing pins. Kara had sacrificed part of a tooth to Buc-ee’s brisket. Slayden and Moira had spent several hundred miles arguing over everything from physical contact to eye contact. The van’s air conditioner had gone home to be with the Lord. We’d transported enough clothing and household goods across state lines to qualify as a relocation. And Dad was already sunburned.
But we were there. Finally. The family vacation could begin.
There was just one small problem.
Day One was tomorrow.
hope today is a good one!
Somehow, this wasn’t even the beginning. You can find more of our family chaos in the Olde Dominion Dad stories.
