The worst trip you've ever taken

Rachel suggested that our trip to Hawaii was worse than our trip to Maui, but I disagree. The Mexico trip was way worse.

Our trip to Maui was less than ideal for many of the reasons that Rachel mentioned, but with the exception of wanting to strangle the kids any time we went in the car anywhere, I think I was able throughout the trip to remind myself that only an asshole complains about a trip to Hawaii, and even with the rain, and the wind, and the other less than ideal aspects, it was still better than all sorts of other places we could have found ourselves. Once you recover from losing the fantasy trip, you can generally make the best of any situation, especially when it's beachfront on Maui.

This is a philosophy I could have used in Mexico in 2006, when I was suffering hard from my preconceptions of the perfect vacation. In early 2006 we got the use of a friend's timeshare in Cabo San Lucas, so we took ourselves a nice family vacation. The place was a resort with poolside umbrella drinks and all the amenities, and I was very much looking forward to sitting by the pool with a series of drinks in my mind, occasionally going for a picturesque swim with lovely wife and my adorable toddler son.

Sounded good on paper. The reality was quite a bit different, however, with the trip diverging from my fantasy in a few key ways:

1. Traveling with a toddler is completely exhausting. I don't know why I was naive on this point, but I was expecting way more idle time and book reading than was even remotely feasible, unless you count very hungry catarpillar. Which I don't. Parker has always been single-minded, even as a toddler, and I must have read that book several hundred times to him during that trip.



2. Rachel was 7 weeks pregnant with the twins, and the plane ride down is when her morning sickness started. She'd had a very rough pregnancy with Parker, including 7 months of morning sickness that began on a vacation, and we both saw this appearance of nausea as the cold hand of doom. We both wanted to believe that this time it would be different, but of course it wasn't different, it was the same nausea for 7 long months. And it began in Mexico, and didn't stop until September 19th.



3. The beach at the resort sucked. I'd wanted to move from the pool to the waves, but our resort was on the wrong side of Cabo, so the beach was a hundred yards of windy sand in front of water too dangerous to swim in.

4. Parker didn't sleep well on this trip, so we spent huge amounts of time each night trying to console him, or at least get him to be quiet. I don't recall what his problem was, but it was all very stressful, and left all of us sleep deprived.

5. Mexico smells funny. I'd forgotten about this in my fantasies, but once I got off the plane I remembered. Peeyew.

So while I'd been enjoying the idea of lounging in paradise, the reality fell far short of that. Instead of idling my days away in the sun, I spent the trip alternately entertaining an insatiable Parker and holding Rachel's hair while she puked. It was maddening to be in what looked like absolute paradise, but to be able to really enjoy so little of it.

The day before we left, Parker cut his head on the metal frame of the shower door, which caused a high degree of screaming and a scar that's next to his eyebrow to this day. This was emblematic of the trip itself - looks pretty, but an unpleasant actual experience.



After several days of this, Rachel and I were both exhausted, depressed, and miserable, so we ended up paying to change our tickets and leaving early.

So Maui was less than ideal. It's a bummer to be in paradise in the rain, but Rachel wasn't sick, and my kids were reasonably self-sufficient, and I wasn't in mexico, so I counted my blessing and had another mai tai.