Take a vacation from your problems.

Last night I was sleeping over at my friend’s house. I woke up around five and couldn’t fall back asleep until seven. It was horrible. But I started brainstorming some stories for my blog. I’ve noticed the posts that get the most feedback are about old memories.

So here’s another one for you.

I was in seventh grade or so and my family and I were driving back from Destin, Florida. We drove the majority of the day and then decided to stop somewhere in Georgia, I think, to spend the night.

My dad was exhausted from driving all day long, but we were all pretty wired from having to sit and we wanted to go look around the city or at least go out to eat. My dad could do no such thing. He had to check into the hotel and he had to go to sleep because “we [had] a long day ahead of us.” Apparently that meant Sam, my mom, and I were all supposed to go to sleep too. I’m not kidding, it must have been seven p.m. and the sun was still shining outside. But Dad was serious.

First thing’s first. We had to get one of those fold up beds for the hotel room. My brother was told to sleep there since he was the “boy” and could suck it up. But Sam is tall so his feet hung way over the edge. He tried and tried to get comfortable but the thing was made for a child, not an 18 year old boy.

We couldn’t stop laughing at the situation, plus with the sun shining through the cracks of the blinds, we couldn’t fall asleep. So Dad started yellling at us for that.

After some quarrelling, I decided to let Sam have the bed and I’d sleep on the foldaway. Got yelled at for that (because of the noise).

Pretty soon after we were all situated, Dad fell asleep immediately, accompanied by great horns of snoring.

Here we are, restless, sun bright as noon day, already in a laughing mood and Dad expects us to sleep to this sound of chaos? The rest of the night when on as follows:

Laughter.

Yelling.

Snores.

Laughter.

“Put a sock in it!” (I still regret saying that…)

Yelling.

More yelling.

Laying in bed listening to the sound of snores for about three hours longer until we fell asleep.