Several years ago, my family sat around the dining room table reminiscing, and someone asked me what my worst vacation memory was.
“Oh, boy,” I replied. “It’s a doozy.” And, indeed, it is.
I was in elementary school, and the trip was to a cavern somewhere. I was excited to see it. We had to drive quite a distance to get there, and our minivan had—in family tradition—been packed around my sister and me. We settled in first, and then my parents loaded in everything after us.
One item was a giant cooler containing our road trip snacks. It was positioned so I had to crawl over it to get out of the vehicle. At one gas station stop, I decided to jump off it rather than do the usual, slightly less graceful scoot-and-flop. The cooler tipped forward ever so slightly, and I landed on my knee on the hard pavement.
It hurt. A lot. I burst into tears, hobbled into the bathroom, cleaned up the scrape as best I could and limped back to the car. We drove a bit further down the road, my knee throbbing all the while, until it was time for lunch.
We stopped at a German buffet because it was the only real option on the back roads we were traveling. I’ve always been a picky eater, and aside from any kind of strudel, I’m not up for the traditional German menu. My knee hurt, I was hungry, and my parents wouldn’t let me have dessert for lunch. Being that I was a pre-teen girl, this led to more tears in yet another bathroom.
To top this off, the only pain medicine we had with us were pills, which I couldn’t swallow. So I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with an entire bottle of Advil, attempting time and time again to get even one down my gullet without gagging. It turns out crying makes this harder, if not impossible.
After this debacle, we were back on the road to the cavern, which I now had to navigate on a bum knee without the aid of medication. It was wet and slippery for the mile-long underground hike, and I was far beyond unhappy. I don’t believe I’ve ever grumbled so much.
I finished telling this story, laughed a little at the memory, and looked around to see my parents’ incredulous faces staring back at me.
“You know that didn’t happen, right?” my dad said.
Read the rest at The Glorious Table!