Well she’s not in our life anymore so we did ultimately win! Maybe thats why we are able to laugh about it now!

OMG. If that had happened to me, I’d have simply made sure nobody ever found my grandmother’s body.

You manage to have fond memories over something that your mother made sure you and your siblings never felt scared about. Your mother kicks serious ass.

Every summer we would head from D.C. down to Tennessee, where my grandfather owned the oldest working grist mill in the country. It was originally built by Davy Crockett’s father, and was still powered by water within my memory. My grandfather used to traumatize me by telling me that kittens sometimes fell into the…

Went to Gettysburg when I was a kid with my mother, my brother, and my grandmother. My grandmother, who can’t drive for shit, drove the whole way and refused to let my mother take the wheel. So we were treated to her constantly stopping on the goddamn interstate to check and see if she had missed her exit, while cars…

Oh man I finally got a good one! I want to talk about my familys trip to Vegas. It included a 16 year old me, my 6 year and 3 year old cousens, my parents, my aunt and uncle, and lastly, my compleatly and totally insane Step-Grandmother without whom this trip might have been slightly less insane. We took a 3 day…

I went on a trip to Germany and Holland with my parents and sister. This in and of itself was not a disaster; it was coming back that was nuts. I flew back to Boston early so I could go to work. My flight had a stopover in Detroit, which had just gone through a huge snowstorm, so lots of overtime for the ground crews, …

My husband once did a family road trip with 6 adults and 7 kids in an Astrovan. They took out the middle seat and put a mattress down.

This isn’t gonna win, but damn it, I’m gonna share. I got my license at 16 and the next winter break, we decided to drive my grandmother down to see her cousin in Pensacola. Grandpa and my father stayed home. So it was a just us girls trip with my mom, her mom and my sister and me. We typically stay overnight in…

I have a rule against traveling with my family because my parents broke up in the middle of the night in Venice the summer after my senior year of high school. My mom and I spent an hour wandering around Venice trying to find a hotel room before finding one, and then spent 2 days getting back home, only to discover my…

The canoe trip from hell. We were going to take a 3/4 day canoe camping trip. go up a couple of lakes in Northern Maine, carry canoes across to others, come back down to our starting point. My sister and I are in our early teens. On the first lake, we have one of our typical early teen sister battles- fighting about…

Your mom is a rock star.

Fathers Day, right after my thirteenth birthday: my dad and stepmom had “decided it was best” that I go live with my mom the year before, but they “still loved” me and therefore, I had to spend Fathers Day weekend with them and my toddler- and baby-half-siblings, camping. Like in a tent with a baby and a toddler and…

Okay, technically not summer. But hellish, so heat? Valentine’s Day weekend, late 90s. My parents have been split up for six months or so, and my brothers and I (11, 14, 17) have been at my dad’s every other weekend. He and his new girlfriend decide that it’s a good time to a) clue us in on the fact that he has a new…

I’m pale as fuck and sunburn in 15 minutes flat...in the Pacific NW. So my 11 year old self was fully unprepared for the microwave intensity that is the Florida sun. My face burned so badly, it blistered all over. My asshole cousins and sister proceeded to call me Freddy Krueger.

Does it count if you didn’t fully realize it was awful?

I was about five years old. My mother decides to load four of us kids in the van and take us from Washington State to California, to go to my mom’s cousin’s wedding. While there, we were also going to visit her siblings and go to Disneyland and all sorts of fun…

When I was 9 I went on a trip with my grandparents and my 13 year old cousin to Arizona. We drove there from Virginia for the Gideon Conference (the folks that put the bibles in hotel rooms). It took us a full week to drive there because my grandfather wouldn’t drive past 2 in the afternoon. We NEVER stopped for lunch…

My dad died during a freak scuba diving accident off the coast of Scotland while we were on vacation.

Short version: our family vacation was interrupted when we were detained by US customs and had our RV confiscated, leaving us out on our asses with all our stuff. We took an 8-hour train home.

When I was in fifth grade, my family rented an RV to go to Niagara Falls (our Nantucket home was under renovation and you’ve…

My dad is an astronomer and in 1989 was offered a research opportunity in Santa Cruz, so my parents decided the best thing to do would be for all of us to go and rent out our house. Here are some highlights from those three months: