Julia L

Family Vacations: A Blessing and a Curse

            Have you ever thought that your family is cursed? With a name like Lucktong, one would think that my family would be, well, luckier than most. However, when it comes to going on vacation, it doesn’t matter if it’s just four of us, or if eighteen Lucktongs are sharing one house; something always goes wrong. I’m not talking about sunburns here, either. At first, these mishaps caught us off-guard, but over the years we learned to go with the flow and do whatever we can to make the best out of the situation.

            Skiing is an activity that almost everyone in my family enjoys. We often take trips to Utah or Colorado to ski the Rockies. Unfortunately, we all live on the East coast, right near sea level. This causes for some extreme discomfort when suddenly, we are 10,000 feet above sea level, struggling to breathe the thin air while speeding down a hill on two pieces of wood. Nausea sets in, and I’ll just say that we had to make several stops on the mountain during our first few days there. I suppose altitude takes a toll on your awareness too. My brother, Drew, was collecting snowballs on the patio outside our condo, and my mom shut the glass door behind him to prevent the frigid air from blowing into our cozy living room, where aunts, uncles, and cousins were gathered after a long day of skiing. He whipped around, prepared to pelt us with his snowballs, and promptly ran straight into the glass and fell backwards into the snow. Needless to say, he had a headache for the rest of the night. The same altitude haze caused my dad to park in the wrong parking lot in Park City, Utah. This resulted in our rental car being towed on Easter Sunday, and all of us missing the on-slope Easter egg hunt at another resort. It also caused miscalculation of time needed to drive to the Denver airport. We missed our flight, paid for four more tickets, and spent some quality time sightseeing in the airport.

            My family takes an annual trip to Hilton Head Island every August. Since the trip is a week long, and we usually have 12 to 15 people in one house, there is often more than one mishap at the beach. On one of the hottest weeks we’ve ever seen at Hilton Head, we arrived at our house, but something was wrong. Outside, the sun glared down on the beach, the ocean water boiled, and the grains of sand were so hot that bare feet were not even an option. The air was heavy and thick, with what felt like 99% humidity. Inside, it felt the same. The expected refreshing cool blast of air when entering the house never came. The air conditioning was dead. The only cool spots were the small, shaded pool or the ocean, and both were still very warm from the blazing sun. We sat in the water until all of our skin looked like a prune, or rather, until the air conditioning company sent a man to come fix it.

However, the waters were dangerous. Every year, every Lucktong who gets in the ocean gets stung by a jellyfish. Near the end of the trip, we end up comparing welts and scars, telling and re-telling stories about what happened. The house pool was not always safe either. Sand shovels and buckets, noodles, rafts, boogie boards, and other toys may look innocent with their kid-friendly tags and bright colors, but they’re really lethal weapons. Countless family members have been hurt by toys in the pool, but one stood out among the others. My brother was playing in the pool with a broken plastic water squirter, and ended up getting a little too rough with my uncle. He swung his arm around and hit my uncle square in the nose with the sharp, broken plastic of the water gun. Blood poured from my uncle’s nose. Fortunately for many of our vacation mishaps, both of my parents and my aunt and uncle are doctors. My aunt had packed Dermabond- glue that is used in the emergency room to fix smaller cuts that don’t need stitches. She glued her husband’s nose together like a pro, and he was back in the pool the next day, bandage and all.

 Another minor cut mishap occurred during an epic game of hide-and-seek. My younger cousin, Sammy, decided to hide behind the dryer. When someone found him, he stepped on the dryer duct, crushing it and cutting his foot open. Blood dripped everywhere behind the dryer, and his parents ended up having to buy a new dryer duct for the rental house.  I was not able to participate in this game of hide-and-seek because I was lying on the couch with a high fever and a raging pain in my throat. My mom used her phone flashlight to look at the back of my throat, and saw that I had dozens of tiny red blisters. My body felt like an elephant had sat on it, my throat felt like someone took a fork and stabbed my tonsils repeatedly, and I was sweating from my high fever while everyone else celebrated my uncle’s birthday. Fortunately, my uncle was certified to call in prescriptions in South Carolina, and he and my dad drove for two hours to the nearest pharmacy on the mainland to get medicine. Later in the week, I started getting the same tiny red blisters on my hands and feet. I had come down with a virus commonly known as Hand, Foot, and Mouth, in which multitudes of small blisters appear in the said areas. It was horrible, and I was dubbed ‘Sickly’ for the rest of the trip, but with antibiotics and lots of ibuprofen, I still had a lot of fun.

There were a few trips when we thought we had escaped the curse, but just before we headed home, something took a wrong turn. On our most recent beach trip, our time in Hilton Head had been perfect and ran smoothly. We were on the way home. My uncle was driving his truck, with three boys in the back seat and me in the front, and towing the two jet-skis behind. We were singing along to the radio, enjoying our ride back home, when suddenly he turned the music down. I looked over at him, confused.

“Do you feel that?” he asked.

“Feel what?” I asked, looking around.

“The car. It’s dragging. It’s on your side. Do you feel it?” he said.

I paused and tried to focus on the car’s movement. “Yeah, I do. What’s going on?” I said.

“Oh, crap. Crap, crap, crap,” my uncle said softly as he turned on his tail lights and started to decelerate.

My cousins in the back seat, who were previously absorbed by handheld devices and video games, sat bolt upright, questioning what happened and why we were on the side of the road. My uncle got out of the car, walked around, and found that the jet-ski trailer’s right tire had blown. We were stranded- everyone else was ahead of us.

“Stay in the car. Do not get out unless I tell you to. Do you understand? Julia, call Susan and your parents,” he instructed. He later asked me to help him, and I handed him tools and watched as he replaced the tire, cursing under his breath. We were on the side of the road for at least 45 minutes.  Every time a huge eighteen-wheeler passed by, the car would shake back and forth, jostling us. He eventually fixed the tire and cleaned up, right as my parents (who had turned around) arrived. Another vacation when we almost escaped the curse was after a trip to Islamorada in the Florida Keys. The night before we left, there was a big thunderstorm, and over an inch of rain fell. Little did we know, we had left our rental car’s windows wide open. When we got to the car to leave early in the morning, the seats were soaking wet, and we were in for a very wet hour and a half drive to the airport. When we got to the airport, we turned in the car as if nothing was wrong, and ran to the nearest restroom to change pants. 

My family’s vacations are never perfect, but their imperfections are what make them fun. If our vacations were perfect and always ran smoothly, it would be boring. We would be taking the same vacation over and over again. The “curse” is a blessing in itself because it adds variety and fun to our vacations. I think the best vacation memories are made while we are trying to overcome the mishaps. We tell more stories about the crazy things that happen to us on vacation than stories about the places we went or the things we did. All of the vacation mishaps have taught us how to make the best out of every situation. Even with all the trouble it’s given us, the Lucktong family vacation curse isn’t so bad after all.