Family Vacations.

With summertime in full swing here, my family & I found ourselves reminiscing about road trips when were all younger. My parent’s always made sure we went on awesome family vacations. We would pack bologna & bagel sandwiches, sing Broadway showtunes the entire drive, argue (we weren’t the Walton’s) and inevitably leave with some sort of crazy store. The Watson clan could never travel without some sort of monumental event.

It was the Summer of (oh Hell, I have no idea… I was probably 11 or 12 so 1992/1993ish) and we had gone on one of our San Antonio road trips. We did the typical Sea World, Fiesta Texas, River Walk events and this time my parent’s decided we were all old enough to go rafting down the Guadalupe River.

For those of you that are familiar with South Texas and river floating you know all about the Guadalupe & Comal, for those of you that aren’t…. let me tell you- river floating is an activity for drunken idiots not families, which we would soon learn all too well.

After a series of shuttle rides and minor incidents we get our cooler loaded up, all FIVE of us hop into a raft and we are set to go on the 4 hour trek down the Guadalupe.

Things were going really well, which meant that shit was going to hit the fan at any moment. So about halfway down the river we’re floating along, enjoying ourselves when my dad spots a man crossing the river with a cooler in his hands. He signals & yells to the man who decides that rather than going back to the side he came from or hurrying to get to the other side, he’ll go ahead and stop right there in his tracks and wait for us to come plowing into him.

Just as we’re about to hit him, the man jumps INTO our raft and knocks my youngest sister who couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 years old OUT of the raft. Luckily she has a life vest on but she is now in the river. My dad jumps out of the raft to get her which leaves me, my other sister and my mom in the raft with the strange man who has just dumped an entire cooler full of empty beer cans into our raft along with his incoherent drunk ass. My dad manages to grab my youngest sister while simultaneously removing the drunkard and his cooler of empty aluminum from the raft. We all try to get over the shock that just happened when we start hearing people yell at us from the banks of river.

“Turn around and try to keep left.”

What?

“Try turning around and try getting to the left side. There’s a drop coming up and you’re not going to make it.”

A Drop? Like, how big of a drop?

“About 4 or 5 feet. Y’all aren’t going to make it.”

So panic sets in because the five us just kicked Charlie Sheen out of our raft and are now going to meet our demise. We attempt to go back and get to the left but there was no way it was going to happen, we had to go down the drop.  We all get to the back of the raft and attempt to hold on to dear life as we make it to the drop and just as we’re all freaking out we manage to go over the drop…………. And get stuck. Five of us stuck at a sharp angle in a raft while drunk people look at us and laugh. My poor dad yet again had to get out of the raft and was able to get us down only to find out that the water at the bottom of this drop was not deep enough to carry the raft with all of us in it. He then proceeded to pull the raft for several hundred feet to get us back to deep enough waters.

The rest of the rafting trip itself was uneventful but to this day, the “river rafting” story is one of our favorites to tell when gathered with friends & family. We will all be drinking and start begging my dad to tell the story, we all chime in and talk over each other… each of us remembering the details just a little bit differently and we all laugh. It doesn’t matter that the trip was a disaster at the time we now have this hilarious memory that brings us all together.

So the point of telling this ridiculous story? Yeah, believe it or not, I have one. I think sometimes we worry about planning the perfect day or the perfect trip and making the perfect memory. In reality, I think it’s the messy stuff that you didn’t plan that ends up making some of the best memories. The important part is that you went and did things as a family and I can’t wait to make those messy memories with Madison.

What are some of your favorite or hilarious “messy” vacation stories??