Sunday, August 13, 2006
nice relaxing family vacation
bad things that have happened since i left for college:1. my mom’s right headlight is six times brighter than any other headlight on the road. it blinded me for five and a half hours.
2. at two fifteen in the morning, my left rear tire blows out. my dad is drunk and has many issues changing said tire. traffic whizzes by at ridiculously high speeds. i cannot find my spotlight.
3. arrive at hotel that looked excellent on paper. hotel is not excellent. in fact, hotel is crap. and it is scary as fuck. let’s examine how: one of the comforters is ripped to shreds, the room reeks of smoke, the box springs and mattresses are too large for bed frame, the overhead light cover is broken, the bathroom smells like mildew, there is no hair dryer, and my sister found a cigarette butt on the floor.
4. take my car to the tire place to have the blown tire replaced. find out that my car has more than seven hundred dollars worth of damage. apparently, i hit a pothole that caused the spring in my rear left tire to become loose. in this collision (that must have happened in my sleep) something important detached itself from something else important also at the rear left tire.
5. find out that we cannot replace just one of the “something importants” on my car and instead must replace both of them. (apparently there is one on each side of the car near the tires. i am not entirely sure what this part is called, but apparently it is necessary to make the car operate in safe and street-legal manner.)
6. we are now stranded at merchant’s tire. we are forced to call a cab. cabbie cannot speak english that well. he speaks ebonics rather fluently, however.7. as we head to virginia beach, we discover that the hampton roads bridge/tunnel is experiencing delays of more than ten to twenty minutes. my father is claustrophobic, so we depart with the hopes of going to the beach and get off of the interstate. apparently, in this area, “no reentry signs” are not what you would consider customary. so we end up headed towards langley air force base with no idea where to go. (luckily though, i am able to find my way back to the highway using an alternate entrance/exit.)
8. when we try to check out of our shit hole hotel (because i refuse to stay there another night. honestly? it’s probably the most disgusting thing i’ve ever seen. even if it looks nice from the outside.) the guys at the counter try to charge us twice. we spend the next hour and a half on the phone with the people from travelocity. never again.
9. trying to find the new hotel, i get the directions the woman gave me mixed up. in other words, we had a misunderstanding. i figured out what went wrong, called the hotel, got the right directions, head towards the hotel. my ill tempered, drunkard father picks a fight with me and screams the entire time.
10. since we had both cars loaded up to bring to school, we had had to unload the subaru into our shit hole room earlier in the day before we went to have the tire fixed. the jeep is already packed full of stuff and our room is full of stuff. it takes more than three trips to move the stuff from our old shit room to our new room.
11. we’re going to be stuck moving all of my shit to school in one car. it’s going to take three trips and it’s going to be a pain in the ass.
to top it off? my father’s being his usual people-loving, ever-friendly, “i’ve-never-heard-of-an-open-container-law-and-thus-do-not-obey-them-even-when-my-under-age-daughter-is-driving-the-car” self and ruining this trip even more so for everyone involved. how’s that for a nice relaxing vacation before i go off to college.
| posted by Summer at 11:06 PM
