Flashback to the WORST DAY OF VACATION EVER

Long time no blog! This semester has been really busy with school and wedding-planning and frankly, I haven't felt like my life has been all that interesting aside from those things so I haven't had much I felt like saying.

I was looking through my FB pictures recently when I stumbled upon photographic evidence of the worst vacation ever and decided that I need to share it with the world.

When I say worst day of vacation ever, I'm talking Griswold family vacation style bad.

Apologies for the profanity but....

Anyway, let's set the stage:

Our story takes place the summer of 2007. Joe and I had just gotten together (I mean literally a week before) and then I jetted off to Florida for a family vacation. Sydni and I went early so that we could have a longer vacation. My grandparents live in near Tampa, so we were staying with them. My family then joined us in Florida and after a few days, we decided to go down to Miami to visit my uncle. So, we all six of us piled into my grandpa's van and we set off on the "four hour" drive to Miami.

And so it begins.

Their sad faces are about to get a whole lot sadder.

A few minutes into our drive, we decided to stop at a gas station that has Krispy Kreme donuts. We got a dozen donuts and set back off on our merry way. As I was eating my donut, all of a sudden, I bit into something extremely hard. Being careful not to bite down too hard and break my tooth off, I pulled the mysterious object out of my mouth and discovered A SHARD OF METAL. Not even joking. WHAT ON EARTH.

Naturally, we called the company to alert them of the issue. Later in the vacation, they personally delivered three dozen donuts, coffee and frisbees to us to make up for our misfortune. But that's a good thing that happened later and we're talking about this horrible-ness of this day.

So naturally, I was a little perturbed by my donut but I thought it was hilarious and got over it pretty immediately. As we continued driving, I began to have to pee really badly. I mean really badly. I hadn't asked to stop to pee at all, so was once too much to ask? Apparently. Instead of driving to a gas station, my mom convinced my dad to stop on the side of the road so we could look for alligators. Seriously. My bladder was hurting but no one seemed to understand that. Then my little sister, Lindsey, who was eight at the time, took off running towards the ledge. There happened to be an alligator swimming by right at the moment. Luckily we didn't have to save her from an attack. Here we are looking for alligators:

As my body language suggests, I was ecstatic.

So all-in-all, this four hour drive took us around six/six and a half hours. Pretty annoying, but not the epically terrible day I suggested, right?

We're just getting started.

My mom had booked a hotel on Priceline. It was supposed to be a really nice hotel, right on the beach so we could walk out to it and we had booked a big suite. We got to the hotel right around check-in time, but if I remember correctly we were still just maybe a half hour early. They told us they were still cleaning the room, but if we wanted to sit in the lobby or go out to the beach, we could. Okay, fine. Not a big deal. So we waited. Meanwhile, birds are flying through the lobby over our heads and the area around us doesn't look particularly sparkly clean. Still, whatever. It's a hotel that walks out to the beach so these things aren't that abnormal.

After waiting the appropriate amount of time, my dad went back up to the desk to get our keys. Nope, room was "still being cleaned." What? So we waited again. And again. For OVER TWO HOURS, even though by this point it was well past check-in time. They kept trying to give us coupons for free breakfast, even though HELLO, breakfast was already included! We were all exhausted and crabby and just over the whole day at this point.

FINALLY, we get our keys and get to go up to our room. I wish I had pictures of this because it's hard to believe it if you didn't experience it. When we opened the door, we found the the whole "living room" area was walled with mirrors. Okay, cool. EXCEPT THOSE MIRRORS HAD DISGUSTING SMUDGED HAND PRINTS SLIDING ALL OVER DOWN IT. Clearly they did a fabulous job cleaning our room for three hours. Upon further inspection we discovered pee in the uncleaned toilet. 

We were about ready to walk out when we heard Lindsey shout from the bedroom, "Hey, somebody left cigarettes in here." Luckily I had the foresight to take a picture of this:

Not cigarettes.

My dad shouted, "THAT'S IT!" and told my mom to get the kids out while he called the desk and told them they needed to get up here immediately and that they needed to bring security with them. I don't know what happened in the room after that.

Meanwhile, we went down to the pool to check in out in the off chance that we might stay the night here in another room. The pool had a layer of what I assume was sunscreen grease on the top of the water, as well as hair clumps floating in it, no joke. Disgusting but unsurprising, given our experience so far.

After another hour of waiting around, my dad came out and said we were leaving and that they were reimbursing us our money and sending us a voucher for a free stay at another Ramada (apparently this hotel was a Ramada, although it wasn't called that). Good one.

In the end, we ended up going to a Holiday Inn about fifteen minutes away, which was incredibly nice.

Non-greasy, not hair-filled pool.

It was the longest, most frustrating day of living Murphy's Law. We were all pretty much at the end of our rope by the end.

But in the end, we ended up having a good time swimming in the pool at our new hotel and starting fresh the next day. The good news is that the whole vacation overall was pretty great.

The end.

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