The Worst Vacation
8/26/09
A Fiasco
The worst vacation my family ever went on was mercifully short, we had planned a week. My mom got a call from my Aunt Lynn, two hours later when mom finally got off the phone; we were told that a vacation in the mountains for our whole family and our uncle’s tribe too had been planned. We were ecstatic! We hadn’t been to that part of Virginia before but we were sure that any part of the Blue Ridge had to be beautiful. My dad called a real estate office and rented a cabin.
We finally arrived after more than eight hours on the road. That we actually found the place was miraculous. We got inside and with the help of a flashlight we found a string for the light bulb that lit the kitchen/living/dining/ kid’s sleeping space. When one of the kids started crying we discovered the infestation. In front of the fireplace belly up, sprawled and shrunk up because it had been dead for while lay the infestation. It was the cutest dead field mouse ever, but that only made it worse. All of the kids were inconsolable until sleep finally hit the place.
Running water was 50 feet from the front door. In order to get water you had to carry a bucket to a hand pump. We all walked to the pump in the morning because there was nothing else to do. First my brother’s tried to get the handle to move, and then my uncle tried. It wouldn’t budge, finally after what must have been twenty minutes my mom decided that the gas station combo grocery mart twenty minutes back up the road would have water that was drinkable and breakfast. The aunts and kids piled into the car and headed down the road. When we got back my Uncle Randy ran out of the cabin and whispered something about a shiner in my mom’s ear they both started chuckling. Then my dad walked out the door and they stopped laughing fast. He announced that the pump after much ado was broke. I only learned later what gave my dad that black eye. He hadn’t given up on the pump when we left and somehow during his Spartan effort to get it going, he whammed himself right in the blinker. Poor dear old dad bore the mark for at least a week.
After lunch we walked around and sat on the porch and did other cabin in the middle of nowhere activities. About three o’clock we heard gunshots really close by. All the kids ran inside the cabin and lay down on the floor. My dad and uncle have retold the story that follows hundreds of different ways: this is the main gist. They grabbed bright clothing: Aunt Lynn’s hot pink night dress and an orange tee shirt. They went around to the side of the cabin facing the woods waving the pink night dress and came face to face with the deer. It was the biggest piece of painted Styrofoam they had ever seen. It had a target of red and white painted right where the heart would be and the blue and white half moon that marked a spine shot. The targets were on the side facing the cabin the other side looked rather realistic from far away. They knocked the deer to the ground and hollered for the fire to cease in our direction. Apologies did not drift out the woods but the firing stopped. By the time dad and uncle Randy got back inside the cabin mom and Aunt Lynn had everything packed and ready to be loaded into the car and we were down the mountain and on to a major highway before dark: so ended our one day stay in the shack.
When my family looks back on this vacation we all laugh pretty hard; though there were plenty of tears when it took place. “We should have just gone camping!” was the constant refrain for a few months afterwards. The main reason it is put down as a bad vacation is because it was just such a disappointing fiasco.
