1 day oh no way

Adrienne shared the prompt for yesterday which was describing your worst trip. I’ve taken a lot of trips in my adult life so this was an intriguing question. So intriguing that I spent half the day thinking about it. I hope the bank doesn’t mind paying me to daydream. Whoops. The funny part was I had a hard time coming up with a bad trip memory. While I’m always ready to come home, the trips themselves are almost always enjoyable. So I had to think back a few years.

 

The one that kept coming to mind was the last trip Ell and I took to Anna Maria Island in Florida. I believe it was October 2004, and as I look back it was probably the beginning of the end for us which made it even worse. Here’s some of the low points:

· We were in the midst of the seven year itch (which is a very real thing, btw) so we bickered the whole time and basically didn’t enjoy each other’s company
· I was well on my way towards the fat slob I would eventually become, and I was already quite ashamed of my body. I swam everyday with a shirt on, we didn’t have sex the whole trip, and she wasn’t very interested in me either even though she thought she was hiding it well.
· The only time I actually laid out in the sun without my shirt on, I got burnt so bad I was sick for three days
· We were almost at rock bottom in our finances including taking the cash that should have been the next month’s mortgage payment and paying for the rest of the trip on what was left of our credit. (I took five credit cards, each with $100 to $200 available balance out of anywhere between $5000 to $10000 credit limit)
· My favorite restaurant in the whole world was on the pier of Anna Maria and served all-you-can-eat Grouper. Three months before we got there it had caught on fire (if I’m remembering the story right) and had since closed for good. So we went across the bay to another outdoor seafood restaurant… food was not good, it was so expensive, and we got eaten alive by bugs.
· We couldn’t stay in our usual place at her grandparents because her weird uncle was a hoarder and the place was filled with trash
· In relation to the previous point, where we ended up staying had no towels, no silverware, no glasses, but it did have two dirty bowls so stained I think someone was murdered close to them. We ended up going to Wal-Mart and basically stocking the cupboards like we would moving into a house.
· Her ninety-something year old grandfather was dying and on more than a couple occasions I had to help carry him up the stairs to the second floor
· We decided to visit my parents on the way home but timed the drive poorly. We ended up driving through Southern Ohio around 2am and in less than thirty miles we saw over two hundred deer. It was so scary.
· When we finally got home, it had rained so bad the ceiling in the bathroom had collapsed from water damage. (That damage never really got fixed all the way and the roof leaked in bad rain until the day I sold the house.)

 

So yeah, that trip sucked. As I look back, much of my bad vibe centers around the fact that me and her just didn’t enjoy each other’s company. White sand beaches, beautiful weather, nothing but alone time, all of which should have related to a romantic ten day vacation. But it was overshadowed by this general sadness in how we were feeling, even if we didn’t know why we were feeling it at the time. The money, my weight, her overall feeling about her Grandfather, it was all pretty heavy.

 

Wow, this was a horrible prompt for a post. Whose idea was this, anyway?! I need to redeem it with something really happy tomorrow to end NaBlo on a high note.