Vacation When I think about my father the word devoted comes to mind. He devotes his time to his country by being a marine and he devotes his love and attention to his family and friends. He is the type of guy that will do anything for anyone. When my brother, sister and I were still all in elementary school my father planned a big weekend ski trip for our family. Growing up it was hard for my family to take vacations and trips because my older brother is severely autistic so my dad wanted to make this weekend very special.
My dad spend weeks planning every detail of the trip, everything from where we would stay to what the best restaurants in the area were. He wanted to make the trip really special because we didn’t get to do things like this very often. The days leading up to the trip we would talk about how much fun we would have and how excited we were. When the day finally came my parents took off work and the kids got to miss school, so we all woke up bright and early and packed the car up. We set off on the long car ride up to West Virginia where we were going to stay.
My brother does not do well with crowds so my father rented a log cabin away from the busy resort that he heard of through a friend of a friend. On the drive there he told us all about the big bedrooms and beautiful views and every passing hour we got more and more anxious. When we finally arrived it was pitch black out. We had been up and down windy back roads through the mountains and we were what seemed like the middle of no where. My dad pulled up the long drive way and aimed the head lights at the front of the house.
To our surprise there was not a beautiful log cabin waiting for us, but an old rusted trailer. My dad looked at his directions again, triple checked the address and unfortunately we were in the right place. He had made the mistake of renting the house without seeing any pictures of it and taking the word of his friend who hadn’t been to the house since he went as a child. Trying to keep everyone calm he told us everything was fine and we should not judge a book by its cover. Slowly my mother helped my siblings and I walk through the inches of ice nd snow on the ground and we made our way up to the front door. We walked through the front door and the house smelled strongly of moth balls and dust. We quickly realized there was no power in the house. My dad tried all the lights and nothing was working. He reassured us as we stood in the freezing cold doorway that he was going to figure this out and we were still going to have an awesome vacation. My mother, who was busy looking for flashlights and lighting the very few candles that were in the trailer, suggested we go find a hotel. My dad was persistent though.
He assured us once again that everything was fine and he would find a way to fix things. What seemed like an eternity later he had given up on trying to fix the power situation and reluctantly gave into the idea of going to a hotel. However by this time it was too late. Snow and ice had begun to fall very fast and the roads quickly became too dangerous to travel on. My family was stuck. My dad unpacked the car as quickly as he could making sure to bring in all the cold weather gear because we were in for a very long, cold night. We all bundled up in our winter jackets and as many layers as we could and got ready for bed.
Needless to say it was a miserable nights sleep. The wind was howling, ice pellets were hitting the metal roof and it was absolutely freezing. When morning finally came I got a good look at the house. It was old and shabby, nothing like my dad had described. The storms had knocked out power lines a few hours before we had arrived and the roads were so bad there was no way we could make it to the resort any time soon. We were only there for the weekend and today was suppose to be the day when we did all the awesome activities like ski lessons and going to the indoor water park.
Discouraged and sad my brother, sister and I sat in the dingy old living room trying to entertain our selves with coloring books and board games my mom had packed for us. My dad looked at us for a minute and looked so sad. He was so excited about us having a good time that weekend that he couldn’t stand seeing us mope around the creepy trailer he had rented. He thought for a second and then ran out to the shed and returned with an old sled he had seen the night before when he was trying to fix the power situation. We quickly threw on our snow boots and the whole family ventured out into the cold.
We trekked through what seemed like a foot of snow to the first big hill we could find. By this point me and my siblings legs were so tired from hiking through the snow my dad put me on his back and pulled the sled with my brother and sister on the sled and took us to the top of the gigantic hill. We took turns sledding down the hill. My dad would give us a big push and we would soar down. We did this over and over. Eventually we moved onto building snow men. We made one for each one of the family members and soon a snow ball fight broke out. Soon we didn’t even remember that we couldn’t go to the resort.
After spending the whole day out in the snow we were all soaking wet and frozen. We made our way to the trailer and the power had come back on while we were out playing. The heat was working and we all dried off and thawed out. I took a long restful nap and when I woke up my parents had hot chocolate waiting for me. The next day it was time to go home. We never made it to the resort but it turned out to be a great trip anyways. It was definitely not the trip we had in mind when we left home that Friday but returning Sunday we were probably more happy than if we had spent the whole day at the resort.
