Summer Vacation Stories
- Heading toward a family reunion, some of us met up at a Denny’s, where we found my uncle digging through the Dumpster out back. He finally got out and showed us a wad of napkins: “Granny wrapped her teeth up, and I threw them away.” For the rest of the trip, he was referred to as the tooth fairy.
- Just as we were about to board our plane to Europe, my sister went missing. Mom sent me out to look for her. The first place I searched was the bathroom. Not there. I tried the café and nothing. I finally found her in the gift shop. One problem: The gate was down, the owner had left, and my sister was locked inside. We had less than an hour until our flight, and we needed every minute of it to find the person with the key and make our plane.
- After my husband and I were married, my in-laws offered to pay for our honeymoon. Visions of Hawaii or Mexico came to mind. Not quite. They told us we were heading to Disney World. Not only that, but since they’d always wanted to go, they were coming along. Turns out, my mother-in-law’s two best friends also always wanted to go to Disney World, as did their three kids, not to mention my sister-in-law and her husband. I can’t say that a lot of honeymooning went on.
- I was looking forward to the trip to New Orleans my mother and I were taking until we reached the airport. Suddenly I had a panic attack at the thought of having to fly. Dad, bless his heart, did everything he could to calm my nerves. “You know, you’re safer in a plane than you are in a car,” he reminded me. That reassurance eventually worked. He gave me a loving kiss on the head and asked my mother, “Did you buy flight insurance?”
- On our trip to California, we visited the Getty Museum. After a while, my bored ten-year-old, Nick, was flagging. “If you’re tired, find a place to sit,” I told him. I then went back to the portraits. Minutes later, alarms went off and security guards were scrambling. Turns out, Nick had found a place to get comfortable. He’d crawled under a velvet rope into an exhibit and perched on a priceless Louis XIV, with his legs up on the armrest.
- We waited on line to enter the Space Mountain ride at Disney World alongside a woman and her son. The boy wasn’t tall enough to go on the ride, but his mother had a solution. She took a pair of high heels out of her backpack and forced him to wear them.
- After a long drive to Canada, border patrol agents asked my father the name of us five kids in the back. Dad was so tired that he drew a blank. The brief lapse resulted in Dad being hauled in for questioning. After convincing them that he hadn’t kidnapped us, he was released—15 hours later.
- Driving across California, we stopped at a red light in a beautiful old western town. As I admired the elegant storefronts and beautiful scenery, I didn’t notice that the light had turned green and back to red again. It was then that a police officer tapped on my window and said, “That’s all the colors we got here.”
- Before our trip to Las Vegas, my husband lost quite a few pounds. This came into play on the airplane. As he was grabbing our overhead luggage, his pants slipped down to his knees. A woman asked, “Can I help you?” “Yes,” he said. “I’ll grab the luggage; you pull up my pants.”
