Vacation: Day Zero
They say it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey, but sometimes they’re both awful. I’ve taken plenty of vacations in my day that ended up being terrible wastes of time or exhausting time sucks, and the way to those places wasn’t anything special either. Sure, it’s nice to be off work, but in my thirties, it feels like I’m only taking off to go to weddings, using up all my personal days to watch other people say their vows, which is not the kind of holiday I’m interested in. Crowded airports, old hotels, and expensive rideshares ensue, all for three days of celebrating a couple that will likely be divorced in eight months. Family trips aren’t a walk in the park either. Growing up, Pellegrino family vacays were cursed, oftentimes before we even left the house. My parents, Gary and Linda, were the adults making the decisions about these outings, and I, along with my brothers, Junior and Bryan, went along with what they decided. Our longest trek as a family of five was from Ohio to Florida, and it was my first experience with a beautifully disastrous holiday. Cleveland to Orlando is over a thousand miles, and we did it twice in my childhood, both during the humidity-filled months of August. You would think we would have learned our lesson the first time, but my dad lives by the motto that if at first you don’t succeed, do it again to be sure.
The first Florida trip took place in the summer of 1994-ish with a new car, or rather, two new cars. When it was decided that we would be driving to the Sunshine State, we needed a bigger vehicle to house our growing bodies, and so it was time Dad hit the dealerships to turn in his compact car and get something we could all fit comfortably in with luggage. He likes to keep us all on our toes and wait until the last possible moment to do anything, so the day before we were due to leave for Florida, he finally went shopping for a sturdy set of new wheels that would get us across the country.
“Get a nice, big van with one of those racks on the roof so we can mount our luggage in a cargo carrier,” Mom instructed.
I thought those “turtle tops” on vehicles were so glamorous when I was growing up, when in fact, the really rich people were flying on planes, not putting a Flintstones duffel bag their grandma won them at a church raffle full of homemade denim shorts on the roof of a car.
“You don’t get good mileage with the luggage on top,” Dad replied, ignoring the rest as he went on his way.
Forever looking for a deal, Dad decided to go to a police auction instead of a traditional dealership like my mom, and anyone rational, would have done on such short notice. I’ve never personally been to an auction, but apparently you can get stuff at a discount when people die, or businesses close down, or items are confiscated by the local authorities. We all assumed he would arrive back with a reasonably priced new van from the showroom. Mom had us finish packing and bring our luggage to the garage so we could pack it up as soon as Dad got home. By pack, I mean I gathered my Garfield fanny pack, a tank that said Designing Woven on it that I liked only because I thought it actually said Designing Women on it, and my Mariah Carey cassette-filled Walkman.
Just as Mom was putting the finishing touches on dinner that night and us kids were bringing our vacation luggage into the garage, Dad arrived home with a used Chevy Caprice. It wasn’t just any Chevy, it was a former cop car, stripped of any indication that it was primarily a police vehicle, except for the fact that it was EXTRA big and long. Just as we were walking our suitcases outside, Dad came driving down the road in his new, big-ass car. As he pulled into the driveway, my mom looked in horror at the sheer size of this thing, while Dad had a confident smile indicating just how proud he was of his new purchase. I can’t stress enough how long this car was. Too long. Like an improv show or CVS receipt. Obviously longer than any car I had ever seen, because even my eight-year-old eyes thought it was massive. I can’t imagine what kind of police work was done with this thing, as it looked like it moved at a snail’s pace. Regardless, Dad rolled down the window as he eased into the driveway, slow enough to see the reaction on all five of our faces.
“Gary, what’s this?” Mom inquired.
“Our new car!” Dad replied proudly.
“Where’s the storage top?” I wondered.
“You said you were going to get a van, Gar! How are we all going to fit in this thing?” Mom added.
Even though it was grotesquely long, it didn’t look like there was a lot of space for seating or storage, and Mom could see that.
“It’s extra long. Lots of trunk space for the luggage! Plus, it was super cheap,” Dad said.
“Why was it so cheap?”
“Someone died near it…or in it, just move the luggage so I can pull this thing into the garage and we can load it up,” Dad said while still in the driveway.
Mom had us boys move our stuff out of the garage to make room for the new car, so I dragged my wares back inside. We lived in a modest house, with what I would say was an average-size garage. It wasn’t small… It was like any of the other garages that could fit two traditional vehicles and some bikes and things. The front had cabinets that housed things like tools and old baseball gloves, plus there was a big, old barrel that had loose basketballs and Frisbees in it. All in all, it was a basic, Midwest garage that we all assumed was normal.
Dad slowly began to pull the Chevy in as my mom’s eyes watched with horror.
“Can I pull up any more?” he asked as the front hood grazed against the cabinets at the front of the garage.
“No, that’s as far as you can go, Dad,” I told him.
I could see my dad’s brows raise to the heavens as he inched toward the front wall, praying that he would have enough space for this thing. Unfortunately, like the time I tried to replicate an Ashton Kutcher look by wearing suspenders over a T-shirt…it didn’t work. It’s always something, isn’t it? Either the new car doesn’t fit in the garage, or you look more like the Mucinex booger than Ashton Kutcher.
“Gary, the car doesn’t fit!” Mom said as she looked at the trunk hanging about four feet past the door and into the open driveway. The garage door would obviously not close with the butt of this thing sticking out so far.
“What do you mean it doesn’t fit?” He turned the engine off and surveyed the parked car.
“You bought a car that doesn’t fit in the garage, Gary!” Mom shouted, both stating the obvious and embarrassing my father in front of his three impressionable young boys.
Dad looked at the car and began to stew with anger. He always had a short fuse, so we knew the emotion that was coming, but we were less likely to have predicted the mix of words that would come out of his mouth.
“Fucking Saremba! Damnit!” Dad said.
I’m sure you’re reading this and thinking, “What or who is Saremba?” I was too. My mother, of course, immediately knew who Dad was throwing the blame to and who was the recipient of his rage.
“That fucking Saremba is an idiot!” he continued.
“You were the one who bought a car that didn’t fit in the garage, Gar! You said you were gonna get a nice, family van with a luggage rack,” Mom reminded him, getting more and more upset herself.
“There’s less mileage with luggage racks! And the car would’ve been fine if fucking Saremba built the fucking house right!” he exclaimed with eyes as wide as the trunk of the new-old Chevy.
Saremba was the builder of our house. No, we never once met him, but he was a prominent figure in my childhood from then on. Technically, I don’t even think it was the name of a singular person, just the name of the construction business. Whenever anything would go wrong inside or around our home, Dad would say, “Fucking Saremba!” When the roof leaked because the gutters were clogged with leaves, Dad blamed fucking Saremba. When the porch swing broke after a particularly rousing thunderstorm, it was because of fucking Saremba. Saremba was the Joker to his Batman, the Burger King to his McDonald’s, and the Megavolt to his Darkwing Duck. Dad hated this man with every ounce of his being, and the garage cabinets blocking the big-ass car so that it wouldn’t properly close sent my dad over the edge.
“Get me my box of cigarettes,” he instructed me.
Dad got back into the Chevy Caprice and quickly backed it all the way out of the garage while I fetched his value pack of smokes.
“And grab me my hammer!” he told Bryan.
“Keep your voice down; the neighbors will hear,” Mom told him sternly through her teeth as voices escalated.
“Screw the neighbors!” Dad yelled from inside the vehicle as he began to unravel.
He parked the car in the driveway, grabbed his box of cigs from my child hands, and surveyed the inside of the garage.
“I’m gonna do something that fucking Saremba should’ve done in the first place,” he said, lighting one of his Marlboro Lights, taking an aggressive drag, and gripping his hammer with a strength that would make Thor jealous.
“What are you going to do?” Mom asked.
“A garage is for cars! I’m getting rid of these cabinets so we can fit the vehicle inside as God intended,” he said as he used the claw part of the hammer to swiftly rip the cabinets from the wall.
“Are you nuts? Even without the cabinets, the car still won’t fit,” she countered.
“Sure, it will, honey. It’s a garage, and they’re made to fit all sorts of vehicles.”
“The car you bought is too long! It won’t fit, Gar!”
By this point, it didn’t matter what anyone said. Dad was already halfway to ripping down the cabinets with a frustration that can only be described as Donald Duck on Adderall or a (more) deranged Grinch. Whatever was inside of the storage began falling out. My brothers and I were gathering up the remains and trying to find new homes for the items, while my mom threw her hands up and went inside for a glass of stress wine.
This way my dad gets at times, some people call it “seeing red.” With him, it’s like an evil spirit takes over his body. He’s since tamed tremendously and is no longer a smoker, but we grew up getting to know this part of him. He became possessed, like a chain-smoking Italian version of the Hulk, but instead of trying to save the world, he was swearing at the ghost of a man and unintentionally wrecking our home.
Dad spent the next hour ordering us around and making some more room in the garage for his new car. We repositioned the barrel of balls to the other side and dragged the dismembered cabinets to the curb for trash pickup. I thought it looked good and clean for such a quick renovation! I imagine that’s how Joanna Gaines feels at the end of an episode of Fixer Upper. Mom, however, was horrified that the pieces of loose wood would be waiting on the curb for almost a whole week, as the city had just collected our garbage. She cooled down just enough after another glass of pinot grigio to come back out and assess the damage from the driveway, just as Dad was starting the Caprice back up to drive it into the garage for a second try.
“Danny, tell me how much room I have up front,” Dad said.
I waved him forward until the car was literally touching the wall where our storage cabinets used to be. You could see where they once were, as it was unpainted, something that would remain so for years to come and remind us of this exact moment.
Dad put the car in park and asked, “Am I good back there?”
“No! You bought a car that doesn’t fit in the garage, Gary!” Mom informed him.
Every time she reminded him that he bought a car that didn’t fit in the garage, you could see his face getting redder and redder, filled with blood and rage. If he were a cartoon, a flame would’ve shot from his forehead and exploded in the air like Fourth of July fireworks.
The most frustrating thing was that he knew Mom was right. Most people don’t consider measuring the length of the vehicle before driving it home, but if you’re buying an unusually long one, perhaps you should pack a ruler. Hours prior, he was on cloud nine, proud of his purchase and excited to share the good news, but now he was about ready to explode. He couldn’t get mad at his wife because she sent him off to get a reasonably sized van, and we were kids, so he couldn’t yell at us for this misstep. A more emotionally mature person would have blamed himself, but not my pop. He unscrewed the lid containing his anger and let out the loudest “FUCKING SAREMBA” yet as he realized there was no way to fit this thing in the garage without doing some more extensive, wall-down renovations. Mom tried to diffuse the situation…
“Let’s just postpone the vacation. I’ll call the hotel and see if they can—”
“WE’RE GOING OUT OF TOWN TO RELAX, LINDA!” he replied through clenched teeth in a tone that was anything but relaxed.
The words barely left his mouth as he got back into the Caprice and floored it in reverse on his way to an actual car dealership, which is where he should’ve gone in the first place. He couldn’t return it to the police auction, but he could trade it in at a used car lot like he had traded in the compact car we started with that morning. En route out of the driveway, he drove into one of the curbside cabinets that he ripped off the wall moments before, pummeling the loose wood into the middle of the road in front of our home and damaging the car on the way to turn it in.
Rolling down the window with a freshly lit cig in his mouth, he shouted one last message to his young family. “Get that fucking wood out of the road, I’m getting a new fucking car.”
Junior and Bryan dragged the cabinet pieces back to the curb, while I followed my mom inside for moral support. She poured herself another glass of stress wine at the kitchen table, emptying the bottle, licking the rim to soak up every last drop, and whispering a Hail Mary. The thought of getting into the car with three children and the evil spirit that took over Dad’s body for a family road trip was almost too much for her to handle in that moment, so despite not being a regular at church, she called on God and booze.
As Mom took a heavy swig of wine, she noticed the budget hotel confirmation number she had previously scribbled down on a stray Sonic the Hedgehog notepad in front of her, and she shook her head in disgust, likely thinking about all the wishes she had for the vacation week ahead. She wished she could fly instead of drive. She wished she had the money for a spacious room to share with her family instead of the cheap hotel that was booked. And her biggest wish of all was that she could go on her own vacation, putting motherhood aside for a few days to experience the type of tranquility she hadn’t known since before her firstborn came along. Memories of adult trips with her girlfriends flooded her head, and she remembered the spa weekend she had with her besties in Palm Springs before she was married. Linda reminisced about the time she drank frozen daiquiris and gossiped on the beach, doing the things you’re supposed to do when you’re out of town and off work. The nostalgia quickly faded as she snapped back into the present. Despite my young age, I knew in that moment that I needed to go to my room and leave her alone, aware that mom needed another vacation from the pre-vacation and the actual vacation, just like all mothers do.
A couple of hours later, after all of us were tuckered out in our rooms for the night, Dad came home with another Chevy (he was convinced Chevys run better than other brands). The extra-long car from earlier, the Chevy Caprice, was a thing of the past a mere hours after it was our expected future, and Dad replaced it with an even bigger vehicle…the Chevy Astro Van. Even though this new van he got us for vacation was huge, it wasn’t extraordinarily long like the other. For what was lost in length, it made up for in height. Dad was able to park the new ride in the garage without any trouble closing, and he went to bed that night at peace. Peace knowing that his wife would be pleased with the van she had originally requested, peace knowing his kids would all fit inside of it with their luggage, and peace knowing that the garage door would safely shut. He would close his eyes next to his beautiful almost-always-right wife and dream about his upcoming trip to a warm Florida beach with the family he loved. The knots of stress that developed that fateful day slowly dissipated as he drifted asleep, unaware that new stress knots would be forming very, very soon.
Vacation: Day One
With a brand-new (used) van ready to take us to Florida, the Pellegrino family finally loaded our luggage the next morning. While Mom was happy it was big and still fit in the garage, it didn’t have the fancy rack on top for bags like she hoped for, so we had to carefully Tetris our stuff in the trunk in order for everything to fit. Dad and Bryan prided themselves in utilizing the space to the best of their abilities, and somehow, they got all the sausage into the casing.
If you’ve never been inside an Astro van, you should know that there are usually three rows of seats—the driver/passenger, then two other rows in the back. For ours, the middle row of seats was removed before we even hit the road so that we could put pillows and blankets down and sleep on the way. In retrospect, this was possibly illegal and certainly not safe.
With no proper seating in the back, at any given moment on the ride to Florida, there were three people shuffling around the floor of a van without a seat belt or anything to keep them in place. Whenever we hit a speed bump, my tiny child body would fly to the air like I was on a traveling trampoline. Dad thought he was doing us a solid after the Caprice debacle by giving us extra space to sprawl out, but maybe we should’ve had actual seats with seat belts. Nowadays it seems like kids use car seats well into their teens, but we didn’t adhere to those restrictions in the ’90s.
Not only did Dad get us the big-ass van and not make us wear seat belts, but he also bought a tiny television set with a VCR attached. Kids today don’t understand how high tech this was. Watching movies in a moving vehicle wasn’t commonplace. This was years before the headrests turned into DVD players or cell phones could play episodes of Euphoria, and we thought it was VERY luxe to sit on the floor of our new van and watch a movie on a four-inch screen while my loving maniac of a father got us to Orlando.
The movies we brought along were family favorites on VHS like My Cousin Vinny, Sister Act, Sister Act 2, and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. My Cousin Vinny isn’t exactly family-friendly, but it was my dad’s fave, and Marisa Tomei made my mom laugh, so she allowed it. Ms. Tomei rightfully won the Academy Award for her performance, and the scene where she talks about the pants Vinny is wearing to shoot deer is one of the greatest comedic scenes of all time, but I digress. There are a lot of f-bombs in the movie but no more than my dad used when talking about the man who built our house, whom he didn’t even know personally, so in the words of the legendary Irish girl group B*Witched, c’est la vie.
My parents didn’t believe in staying anywhere overnight along the way since it was more costly, so we drove the entire distance, only stopping for food and gas, even though no one else other than my dad was equipped to drive. Mom refused because it was a big-ass Astro van without seat belts for her children, and my brothers weren’t old enough to drive yet, so that meant Dad was behind the wheel for eighteen plus hours…or so we thought. Whenever I see family road trips in movies, the wife is riding passenger, but Linda was not interested in even being up front acting as the human navigation. She wanted to lie in back and nap in between viewings of the Sister Act films. No one can resist the charms of Whoopi Goldberg and Kathy Najimy singing in habits. Bryan was the most obedient of us, so Dad convinced him to help direct him while riding passenger. Back then there was no Google Maps or MapQuest or TomTom, so Bryan had a giant paper map that was bigger than he was. If you asked me to use that thing, even now, I would lead you to the Emerald City, not Florida. When I see a map, all my critical thinking skills go out the window and I feel like I’m looking at one of those magic eye layouts you used to see in the Sunday newspaper. My brain simply cannot compute a map of any kind. Dad also had a fancy radar detector that was supposed to beep every time we were near the police so he could slow down and drive the speed limit, but that soon went to shit. About an hour into the drive, it wouldn’t stop beeping, so Dad threw it out the window and Bryan had to act as a Foley artist, making noises if he saw a speed gun or anything that resembled the car that didn’t fit in our garage the night before.
During the middle-of-the-night driving, the TV went off and Mom, Junior, and I went to sleep, while Dad and Bryan kept us on schedule. I know I said my Dad was piloting for eighteen plus hours, but it’s time I live my truth. I have a vivid memory of that specific road trip that comes to me at random like a That’s So Raven vision. Sometimes I’ll see this in my sleep, and other times it will come to me when I’m in line at the grocery or working out at the gym. It was the wee hours and everyone in back was snoozing. The car swerved, and my tiny body slid across the floor of the van, abruptly waking me up. My eyes opened and I wondered if we had arrived in Florida. I soon realized I was still in the van, and we were on a quiet road, most likely somewhere outside of Georgia. I heard a familiar snoring, but Mom and Junior were both quiet sleepers, so I knew it wasn’t them. This was the loud snore of a grown man. I glanced at the dashboard to look at the time. I rubbed my eyes to see more clearly, but I still couldn’t make out the digits on the clock, so I grabbed my glasses and put them on to see that it was just after 3:00 a.m. The loud snores came from up front, so with my corrected vision, I looked at the culprit in the passenger seat…it was Dad! So, by now you’re probably wondering who was driving. I was too. Mom was passed out, and the rest of us were fourteen and under. Before I could do the math, I heard my twelve-year-old brother…
“Go to sleep, Danny!”
Bryan was behind the wheel, with Mom and Dad off in dreamland.
“Why are you driving?” I asked him in a whisper.
It was a simple, innocuous question, but Bryan acted like I asked him something absurd. I might as well have said, “Why are you dressed like Ursula the Sea Witch?” or “Are you the Zodiac Killer?” I thought my question was valid and straightforward, but Bryan was wildly offended and simply wanted to continue his journey of being in charge of our collective journey.
“Dad was teaching me how to drive, now shut up and go back to bed!”
“But Dad’s asleep,” I replied.
“You should be too!” Bryan instructed.
“But—”
My line of questioning was distracting him from the task at hand, and he briefly found himself driving on the wrong side of the road. He swerved to get us back on track, and fortunately (or unfortunately), the sudden movement didn’t wake up any of the others, although Dad shifted a bit in the passenger.
“Go back to sleep, you’re annoying me!” he exclaimed.
Rather than argue, I followed his instructions and curled back up with my blanket. Years before Carrie Underwood rose to fame courtesy of American Idol, I lay back down and I too called for Jesus to take the wheel as I closed my eyes on a midnight Astro van through Georgia. I’m not sure why I was so comfortable sleeping when my life was in the hands of a tween who hadn’t even hit puberty, but I drifted off to bed and my eyes wouldn’t reopen until the next morning.
The sun rose and I, too, began to awaken. As I put my glasses on again, I saw that Dad was back in the driver’s seat as if nothing had happened. Was I dreaming? How long was my twelve-year-old brother leading us to Florida? I may never know. Mom couldn’t believe how chipper Dad was the next day, and they were laughing and making cute jokes with each other all morning as we entered the Florida state limits.
“Normally you’re cranky if you don’t get enough sleep,” I overheard Mom say to Dad.
“Vacation is all about relaxing,” he said calmly as if he’d unlocked the secret to a successful trip.
“It must’ve been a bumpy road because I felt like I rocked to sleep,” she said. What she didn’t know is that the rockiness was due to her middle child being barely able to see the road and reach the pedal at the same time without almost driving us into a ditch. And Dad was only happy because he’d gotten a few solid hours of z’s. Bryan, on the other hand, was grumpier than usual. Instead of sleeping like the rest of us, he drove from Savannah to Jacksonville without any conscious company, and when Dad finally did come to, Bryan was forced to direct him again and keep an eye out for the po-po.
When we finally arrived at our destination, Mom and Dad instructed us to stay in the car while they checked us in at the hotel office. The vacation property was set up differently than a traditional resort. There was an office in one location, and down the road, in a separate building, were the rooms that the guests stayed in. Us kids watched as they got the keys from the rental office, anxiously awaiting the moment we could get out of the godforsaken van we had spent so many hours in. Despite having extra leg room without the middle row of seats, it wasn’t like we were in a spacious camper. It was still four males and one adult female in a van for the length of the time it would take to watch the entire The Lord of the Rings extended edition saga, plus The Irishman and a Judd Apatow feature.
The parents came back to the vehicle from the check-in office holding our room key and a flowerpot with a gator and flamingo holding hands on it, which Mom gripped proudly. The check-in office had a little gift shop and she saw a pot she liked quite a bit, so she splurged and bought it, declaring the pot her first souvenir. She had a wide smile on her face, and while it might not have seemed like much, purchasing it was her way of starting the trip off with a splurge. The night prior was so chaotic, and the drive so long, she wanted to treat herself now that she assumed the fun part of the vacation was about to start.
The rooms were a few blocks away from the check-in center, so we had to drive just a little bit more. Once we arrived in our designated parking spot, Dad opened the back of the van and started to unpack the luggage immediately, even before checking out our new digs. The baggage had fit perfectly in the van, so emptying became a strategic game to ensure things didn’t fall out willy-nilly. All the bags came out one by one, and we sat them outside the car so it would be easy for all of us to take everything inside, like a family-style assemble line.
Just as we got the last of the gear out of the trunk, we heard a scream. Mom noticed the window of our hotel room was shattered, looking like someone had broken in, so we wouldn’t be staying there after all. That meant the belongings my dad just carefully unloaded would now have to return to the trunk.
“Damn it,” Dad said, this time unable to blame the events on Saremba.
Packing the van the first time not only took him about an hour, but it also took a lot of concentration. He was lacking the patience and demeanor to do it for a second time after such a long road trip. He was trying his best to remain calm, but his patience wouldn’t last long. The bigger bags went in, and he tried to position everything else the way it was before the broken hotel window reveal. He’d ask us boys to hand him others to speed up the process, but with only half the goods in and the trunk seemingly already full, there was no way he was packing it as efficiently as he did the first time.
“Should’ve gotten the cargo carrier,” Mom said under her breath but purposefully loud enough for everyone to hear.
Dad pulled everything out of the trunk again and started over, his temper now flaring as he tried to repack the luggage of five people. Ordinarily he would’ve reached for a smoke, but mom wouldn’t let him pack his cigarettes on the trip, encouraging him to quit over the relaxing vacation. Oops.
“Get in the van, I’ll load it myself,” he told us.
We all knew that meant everyone except Bryan should go back into the vehicle. Junior and I got out of a lot of manual labor throughout the years because we weren’t quite as obedient. He and I are both more stubborn than Bryan is, so our middle brother got stuck being Dad’s right-hand man, even when he was running on zero sleep. My mom set down her new flowerpot alongside the luggage outside the van and then settled in while Dad and Bryan took care of it. I continued to watch them through the window as they tried to fit everything, this time seemingly finding more success than the last effort, and pretty soon everything was loaded in other than my mom’s new souvenir flowerpot. I watched as Bryan handed it to Dad to pack in, but without missing a beat, Dad tossed it into a nearby trash can, shattering it to pieces before he slammed the trunk closed and got back in the driver’s seat.
“I threw away your ceramic tub,” he announced glibly as he put the keys into the ignition, not thinking it was of any real importance.
“My what?” Mom asked.
“The tub!”
“What tub?”
“Your ceramic tub!”
“A bathtub?”
“Your plant tub!”
“What’s a plant tub?”
“Your tub, your tub, the fucking tub!” Dad said, surely wishing he had a Marlboro to calm his nerves.
When Dad got this upset, he didn’t make any sense. Part of me thinks my mom liked to rile him up by acting clueless just to get under his skin. It always worked and I find myself using this tactic to piss off people in my own adult life. It’s one of the most fun ways to annoy people.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your ceramic plant tub!” he yelled.
“My flowerpot?” she asked.
“Yes, I threw it away.”
“Why are you calling it a ceramic tub, Gar?”
“That’s what it is!”
“It’s a flowerpot!”
“Same thing!”
“Turn back around, I want to go get it.”
“It’s broken. I threw it in the trash can.”
“Gary! I just bought it!”
“We don’t have room for it.”
“You should’ve gotten a van with a cargo carrier like I said,” Mom told him.
“Mom’s always right!” I added.
“Do you want to go back home, because I’ll drive us right back to Ohio!” Dad replied.
Bryan’s eyes went wide as soon as this threat left my father’s mouth. He worried that he’d have to take the wheel, and he wasn’t ready for that kind of responsibility quite so quickly after his last late-night drive.
“If you would’ve gotten the cargo carrier, we could’ve put our souvenirs in the trunk,” Mom said.
“We don’t need any souvenirs! We have enough shit at home,” Dad countered.
“It was cute!”
“Flamingos and gators aren’t friends, Lin!”
“I’ll buy my souvenirs if I want to buy my souvenirs. You’re buying cars left and right…”
“This is a van, not a car!”
“You bought that other car! You got this van and that other one that—”
The words were coming out of her mouth, and even she knew that what she was about to say was going to push him over the edge, but she didn’t care. She wanted this man to know that she was right and he was wrong. If he had put his ego aside and listened to her in the first place, then maybe we all wouldn’t be in this mess.
“Don’t say it—” Dad pleaded.
“You bought that other car…that didn’t fit in the garage.”
Silence. He hung his head in shame as the air went out of Dad’s metaphorical tires and he finally had to accept defeat.
No one else said a word as we pulled back into the hotel check-in office parking lot, ready to exchange the keys and get a new room. Dad went in while Mom waited in the van with us, arms crossed and no stress wine for her to grab hold of. After a few minutes, he exited the office with a pamphlet and a brand-new flowerpot, only this pot was bigger and shinier than the one that was shattered near our previously booked room, albeit without the animals on it. He entered the van and handed it to Mom in the back seat without saying a word, and she didn’t say anything either, just shooting him a look. I learned in that moment that two people in a marriage can say so much without saying anything at all. Mom looked out the window as she held her new pot, and we exited the lot in the Astro van, a van that already created a lifetime of memories.
I assumed Dad booked us a new room at the same hotel, but I was wrong. Instead we hit the open road. Dad glanced at his pamphlet while the rest of us sat exhausted at what was the start of our family trip, quietly looking out the windows and wondering how we would all survive the next few days with each other. A few minutes later, we pulled into a resort that looked way chicer than that other place we were planning to stay.
“It says they have HBO in the rooms!” I shouted as I saw the sign outside, excited to spend my nights watching Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead like everyone else who had premium cable did in the ’90s.
“Looks like we’ll have HBO this week,” Dad assured.
When he went into the original hotel office, he canceled our reservation and made a new one. He splurged for a nicer hotel without running it by any of us. It probably cost more than he wanted, and who knows if he was fully refunded for the last place, but it was his way of apologizing. The new hotel had a pool, a bar, and a much bigger souvenir shop in the lobby, filled with all sorts of items no one needs but will buy anyway because that’s what you do on vacations; you buy expensive souvenirs that remind you that you’re supposed to treat yourself. It was the kind of hotel Mom had wished she was staying at twenty-four hours earlier when she was making her wishes. She got out of the van with a confident smile on her face and a new flamingo-less flowerpot in her hands. It wasn’t the spa getaway she daydreamed about being on with her friends, and it certainly wasn’t a relaxing few days, but at least she got a room upgrade and only had a few days left. Mom looked at the family she loved more than anything—the kids who were already exhausted and the husband she so carefully chose to spend the rest of her life with, and she realized that a family vacation isn’t about having fun or recharging your batteries, it’s about finding the little victories on the way to the finish line. It’s about getting through the journey alongside the ones you love.