Originally Posted By goodgirl Topic: Vacations Question: Tell us about your worst childhood vacation.
Originally Posted By 4Disnee I guess that I would have to say it was when we went camping in a tent and I was sick with the flu the whole time. I was very young but remember it very well and it was not a good thing.
Originally Posted By tiggerdis_ Ohhhh, if you can believe it, it was at Disneyland. I was with my then boyfriend. We had flown in the night before, and spent forever trying to find our hotel. It was just off the freeway, and we could see it, but couldn't figure out how to get to it. Of course he wouldn't ask for directions. When we got to DL the next morning, I was so excited. He took one look at me and said - "How about if we meet back here in about an hour." Um...well, I didn't marry him.
Originally Posted By wahooskipper I never had a bad vacation. Some were more memorable than others, but nothing sticks in my mind as bad. We did spend one weekend at the beach in a tent camper and it rained all weekend. But, we made our own kind of fun out of that. Getting the tent camper out of the mud at the end of the weekend was a challenge but still memorable.
Originally Posted By Disneymom443 My new step dad tried to take us to Yosemity w/o any resverations. This one guy heard our problem and said that we could stay at the site next to him until his friends come in. Which is really nice right .... well we were kicked out the second night in the middle of the night. I didn't like my step dad and that just made things worse. this was back in 79"
Originally Posted By wahooskipper Oh yeah, I remember this time we were gong to stay with some friends at Yosemite and there were people in our campsite that we had to kick out in the middle of the night. I think it was in '79. (Actually, I did go in '79 and some other years too. Yosemite is one of my FAVORITE vacation spots of ALL TIME!)
Originally Posted By amazedncal2 Not bad. just boring. We had a place on the lake at Clear Lake and we went there every weekend. My dad drove through the winding roads through St. Helena and Middletown and I got sick EVERY time. This was in the days before air conditioning too. We had a boat and my dad and sisters and brother would ski and I'd be bored out of my mind. I skied a couple of times and I was so sore that I decided it just wasn't fun. I'd rather have been reading a book lying on the beach I know, poor baby, HAD to go to the lake EVERY weekend but really I just hated going and leaving my friends and all my stuff
Originally Posted By Schmitty Good Vibes I can't remember any bad childhood vacations. I remember my folks used to love to go camping and I was always getting car sick on the windy roads to the campsites. I remember being packed into a small cab-over camper with my sister for three days on the road to Yellowstone. We were really on each others nerves by the time we got there, and when we finally arrived and sat down to dinner, my sister swatted a mosquito off my cheek. I didn't know anything about the mosquito, I only knew I just got slapped by this horrid person I'd been confined with for most of three days. I punched her so hard she was unconcious for a few minutes, which shocked the heck out of mom and dad. Then there was the time my sister and I both broke out with mumps on the day we started our Disneyland vacation. My folks just wrapped us up in hoods and scarves and we went anyway. But I have no real memories of a bad vacation, just bad moments. I was a very lucky kid.
Originally Posted By Ursula I know of I few I just hated, but they were not horrible or bad. We traveled in a motorhome cross-coutnry a few times and I just hated that, being confined to a small space with my family, no offense to my family, but why the heck didn't we just take an airplane to Niagra Falls?
Originally Posted By Kennesaw Tom I never had any really awful vacations. But I remember one spending a month with my relatives in Vermont. We decided to hike part of the long trail from Johnson, VT through Smuglers Knotch and accross Mt Mansfield mt range and on to my relatives home in Richmond, VT. We though the hike would take us two days when in reality it was a five day hike. All I remember was that I had the food in my backpack and instead of it getting lighter it kept getting heavier as my cousins kept putting cooking ware in my backpack. We climbed up the steepest mountains in Vermont. We ran out of food after the second day. I remember eating a cardboard box for lunch one day. That night we were suppose to have hotdogs and hot chocolate and I didn't eat anything as the idea of eating hotdogs made me nausious. I remember staying in a open air cabin on the top of Mt Mansfield ( tallest mountain in Vermont the cabin is above the clouds ). You would open the door and a cloud would come in and then go out threw a window.. it was so funny. When we got to the cabin we found all these ropes hanging from the ceiling... and hung up our packs. At night the place would alive with chipmunks and they wear chew into your backpack trying to get food. Lets see the first night was Sterling Lodge... where we woke up in the middle of the night when the female ranger was screaming as a mouse got into her sleeping bag. Second night was on top of Mt Mansfield. Third night was Bolton Valley Lodge.. which is actually on the Von Trapp Family property in Stowe ( its on the Bolton side of the mountain ). Finally we ended up walking off the mountain into Braintree State Park ( they do research on Maple Sugar trees there ). Called at a ranger station and got driven home. My uncle and aunt weighted my backpack it weighted 45 lbs. And I had that strapped to my back climbing up some of the steepest mountains in Vermont, they are all major ski areas, Elephants Head, Smuglers Knotch, Stowe..... Those ski trails were so steep to this day I have never done downhill skiing. I only do cross country skiing.
Originally Posted By Tiggirl Bleck... I remember one particular trip we went to Alaska for 4 days. I was 15 and my brother was 7. We stayed with my Uncle's ex-wife. Alaska was pretty but my brother and I were SO bored. My Uncle took my dad fishing every day and we had to stay with my ex-aunt (?) who we barely knew as they were divorced before my brother was even born and this psychic who was staying with her who chanted to her dog. LOL! It was summer so it was light all day long and I barely slept the whole trip. Then on the day we were going to leave a cruise ship ran a-ground and since were traveling standby (dad works for an airline) we had to go our of our way to make it home and it was a very long flight. Ugh, Worst trip ever. LOL! I think thats the only vacation I didn't like. I've never had a desire to go back to Alaska. LOL! ~Beth
Originally Posted By LuLu Mine was also Disneyland. We went in celebration of DD's 5th birthday, not knowing it was Spring Break - and it seemed like every college, elementary and high school must have been off at the same time! I remember going to DL late morning and trying to get thru the crowds - it was impossible. That night, my DH & MIl were extremely ill (probably food poisoning) with projectile vomiting. It was hideous. They couldn't wait to go home the next morning. UGH!!!!
Originally Posted By sherrytodd I remember one vacation when my dad, a pilot, wanted to get his float plane rating so we went to the Salton Sea. The weather did not cooperate and we were stuck in a hotel bored to death for three days. The thing I remember was how horrible the place smelled. There were dead fish all over the shores rotting and the hotel used some horrible orange smelling cleaner. This was probably about 25 years ago and I still can remember the smell of that cleaner. And to make matters worse, due to the weather, my dad was never able to complete his rating. We told dad if he ever tried to take us back there again he'd be looking for a new family.
Originally Posted By RAM1984 I also cannot remember anything that I would call a bad vacation. My parents were school teachers so we had long summers and traveled and camped out a lot. One that was less fun was when I was 8. We had gone to SoCal to visit some relatives. I so wanted to go to Disneyland but we didn't. And to make matters worse, we drove by it and I could see the Matterhorn. I had never been and would not get my parents talked into it for 2 more years. Anyway, we went to Knott's Berry Farm. (This is when it was, indeed, a berry farm.) Pretty boring. I started feeling this tighening in my throat and turns out I had come down with mumps. KT: My dad and sisters and I took a back packing trip where we froze by night and starved by day. Luckily my dad had the foresight to pack lots of Lifesavers (and boy, they sure were) and chewing gum. But when my sisters and I talked about it in later years it was one of our fondest memories. (I was only 6.)
Originally Posted By Goofyernmost The one that sticks with me the most was a family trip in 1962. We had gone to Allegheny State Park in Salamanca, NY. We had a small tear drop shaped camping trailer to house my Father, Mother, Sister and myself. The first incident was the car (a 1959 Buick Station Wagon) breaking down. It always broke down. Eventually that week my Father traded cars while we were on vacation. The second thing was during the night the little trailer was closed up tight and my Father, a pipe smoker, woke up in the night and tried to light his Zippo and it wouldn't go, he then noticed that we were all breathing in a labored manner and concluded that we had run out of oxygen in our little abode. He opened the door, woke us up, we all started breathing normally, and his lighter worked. We almost suffocated, thank god dad smoked. The third and most significant was that while we were in the gift shop my Mother got out of the car and went behind it to get her sweater when the car behind rolled down the hill pinning her legs between the cars. Fortunately nothing was broken but her legs were severely bruised to the point that she couldn't walk. Since our camper didn't have a toilet, my father and I had to carry her from the trailer to the bathroom every time. She stubbornly refused to let us go home as she didn't want to ruin our vacation. We finally convinced her that we were not having all that good a time and we went home. To this day if anyone even mentions camping or RV's, chills run up my spine. I vowed that if I couldn't afford to stay in a motel then I couldn't afford to go. End of discussion.
Originally Posted By Autopia Deb This was more a day trip than an actual vacation. My mom and grandma decided to take me and my sister up to Paradise for a weekend camping trip. Paradise is an area in our local mountains (the rest of the country might call them foot hills). As I recall the truck was over-heating and having difficulty. The temp had to be close to 100 degrees. I have exema which is agrivated by sweat, and it was very bad when I was a kid, especially behind my knees and inside my elbows. With the heat and NO A/C my exema was going nuts. I remember itching like crazy all day, I had scratched my legs bloody. I was SO miserable and so was everyone else. I vaguely remember parking at Cachuma lake for awhile and getting popcicles, but I think we ended up coming home without ever actually camping.
Originally Posted By wahooskipper I once drove cross country with my family out to California because we wanted to go to Magic Mountain. When we got there it was closed. What made matters worse is that my aunt died on the way out there and.... ....wait...this sounds vaguely familiar.
Originally Posted By DlandJB The vacation itself wasn't bad -- 3 weeks on Cape Cod. But driving home the dog died. That pretty much did us all in.
