Why I Don't Travel With Family (His)

Early in our marriage, my mother-in-law, M, arranged a family day trip to the Sight and Sound Millennium Theatre in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She purchased tickets for the theatre'’s production of Noah, the Musical”.

It was an plan conceived out of a desire to provide her family with a day'’s worth of fun so wholesome that all adults in the party would feel like they were eating saccharine straight from the tiny little packets.

It was a dreadful idea.

I am not a morning person. I get up early (around 5:45 most mornings) by necessity, not preference. Left to my natural rhythms, I am most productive when I am permitted to stay up until 2 or 3 am and sleep until 10 or 11.

The summer we attended this show, I was on break (I worked for a school) and had been able to slip into my natural cycle. Getting up early to go see an overtly religious play 6 hours from home was definitely NOT my idea of a good day. But we were freshly married, having financial problems and had been "“persuaded" in joining the rest of the gang under the premise that " “it will be nice for the two you to escape your problems for a few hours!"”

Incident #1: The walkie-talkies.
My father-in-law, bless his control freakish heart, purchased two sets at the flea market and passed them out in such a manner that all cars could be in contact with all other vehicles in the caravan. What ensued was 6 hours of listening to my husband's two nephews act their age. The only elaboration I can add is fart jokes. Six hours straight of fart jokes.

Incident #2: The "Train Museum".
Lancaster County hosts some nice outlet stores, including QVC. Because we left home so early, we had 2.5 hours to kill before the show. My sister-in-law and myself campaigned for a stop at the QVC outlet. We even got a majority agreement.

Instead, we had to stop and spend an hour looking at a boxcar left near a tiny tourist trap in the middle of a cornfield. We were outvoted by my husband's (then) two year old nephew and my father-in-law. Near the boxcar was set of shops selling fudge and generic tourist junk.

My father-in-law swears to this day that he thought it was a museum. Funny, the rest of us saw it for what it was - a tourist trap. You could not even climb in the car. It sat there like a siren, luring us to purchase overpriced t-shirts and bad fudge.

Incident #3: What do you get when you take a child who is afraid of the dark and afraid of animals to see Noah in a theatre?
Answer: You get a child who screams bloody murder for 30 minutes straight before the show. Directly into my ear. Without coming up for a breath. Neither of his parents saw the show, as they spent the entire performance outside the theatre.

Incident #4: What do you get when you try to interfere with a parent's attempt at discipline?
Answer: You get a very tired, very angry sister-in-law screaming at her father in the middle of a crowd of 500 people. We were standing 20 feet away and we could hear her clearly.

Incident #5: So where do you eat in Pennsylvania Dutch Country?
You eat at Hoss's. There is no more to be said about the subject.

Conclusion:

1. A massive migraine.
2. A guided trip to and from the rest stop bathroom due to the urgent removal of contacts lenses and the failure to bring my glasses.
   
3. A vow to never go on another trip of any duration with his family again.

Almost five years later I remain steadfast.