Why Family Vacations Are So Boring
And how to get out of them
My next-door neighbour stopped going on holiday years ago.
‘How did you get out of it?’ I asked him.
He smiled profoundly, ‘I got divorced.’
Good answer.
It’s not that I don’t like a holiday. When I’m sitting by the pool reading a thriller and drinking rum, it’s not too bad.
It’s just getting there that I dislike. The planning, the decision-making, the booking, the spending money, the buying of shorts and T-shirts I’ll never wear again.
Then there’s asking the boss for my two weeks off. A process he always makes difficult because he doesn’t believe in people having time off.
Then I have to organise someone to water the garden inside and out, feed the cat, tell everyone we’re on holiday (I don’t know why that’s important), and finally check my will is in order.
Very important! Each time I step on an aeroplane, I solemnly believe it’ll be my last few hours on Earth.
I can see why travel agents sprang up.
They ease the burden of travel, but they don’t ease the suffering. They might organise the logistics, but they don’t manage the mundane.
They don’t pack your bags or check you’ve got enough socks and underwear for two weeks of heavy sweating.
Neither do they check that the hotel mattresses are clean. Have you ever looked under the sheets of a hotel mattress? Don’t! You’ll never sleep in another bed apart from your own again.
Furthermore, a travel agent can’t compensate me for the loss of my routine.
A routine that for 50 weeks a year is so streamlined, so precise, that NASA uses it to recalibrate their atomic clocks with.
I normally try to make a last-minute appeal to my wife that I had a very bad dream. Involving planes. Unfortunately, she’s heard it all before, so I start packing.
Holidays would be better if there were no other holidaymakers. No other people crowding up the lifts and lobbies, bars and restaurants, the pool and the gym.
Then there’s the conversation.
‘Hey, fellow holidaymaker. Where are you from?’
‘Same place as you,’ I reply. ‘We live in the same town. I see you at Walmart every week, but we don’t say anything because we don’t know each other. Only now do we feel we have to speak to one another because we’re on vacation.’
As a result, our family ends up being ostracised from the rest of the hotel, and our kids don’t make any friends. But that’s the price they pay for having a miserable father.
I once went to Venice on holiday alone, only to bump into a guy I knew at school, Mark Saunders, on my first night in the hotel.
‘Hey! Phil! Fancy seeing you here.’
I ended up spending an agonising meal with his racist wife and two Nazi memorabilia-obsessed sons, who were eating their pasta with what looked like a couple of SS-embossed forks.
If the waiter had offered me a syringe full of cyanide instead of another Tiramisu, I’d have taken it.
The next day, I begged the hotel manager to find me another hotel. Anything! A hostel full of college kids sniffing glue would be fine.
He understood my situation perfectly, and not only did he find me a hotel and refund my unused nights, but paid for a Gondola to take me there.
Turned out to be the best holiday ever.
It’s not that I don’t love my family — I do. But it’s difficult for loners to go on family holidays. By definition, family holidays mean being with people.
This is where I go wrong.
At the airport, I normally give them the option: ‘Why don’t you just go without me. I’ll stay here. You’ll be happier.’
‘You are their father,’ my wife says, ‘and fathers go on vacation with their children. This isn’t Venice, you know.’
My wife always brings Venice up — that best vacation ever! — so I cave in and say: ‘Of course, I’m looking forward to it. Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.’
‘Good,’ my wife grins. ‘Because I saw Mark Saunders in Walmart a few days ago, and as luck would have it, he’s going to the same resort. Look, he’s over there.’
I glance across the airport concourse to see Mark Saunders dressed in a cheap Walmart linen suit, flanked by his now hideously fat wife and even more evil-looking grown-up sons.
And you wonder why I hate vacations.
Found this boring. How about some more garbage from me here.
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Family and vacation are two words that should never go together.
I'm reminded of an epic family vacay on Maui. We first checked into a sketch 'treehouse' resort I'd found, that looked great on Airbnb. In person, it was totally deserted and creepy as hell. We found our treehouse, which was full of dead insects and rotting fruit. I sat down in a hammock chair to assess the situation, and the rotting rope suspending it immediately snapped and I smacked my skull on a table corner on the way down, giving me a concussion and a blinding headache. Our cranky 16 year old son, unbenownst to us, was actually running a fever and in the first stages of mono. Mercifully, (we were literally praying) the Grand Wailea happened to have vacancy and we checked in (after more hours of driving--part of this on a road warning us that we might die if we chose to proceed) Once we reached the Grand Wailea things improved. The kids were old enough to hang out in the pools and entertain themselves. The mono must have decided to dial the symptoms back, because our son seemed to perk up. Our 15 year old daughter was content to just float around languidly on a pool noodle all day, visiting the swim up ice cream bar more frequently than we realized. What a stroke of genius to allow kids to charge food and drink to their hotel room! When we checked out, we were given a 600.00 bill--and that was just for our daughter's Dippin' Dots ice cream!