Globe Corner Blogs

Agile families are all alike; each clumsy family is clumsy in its own way.  (To slightly misquote Tolstoy.)

In every family there are certain traditions that must be followed on every vacation. You must play a certain silly car game; stop at the same ice cream stand on the way; get lost and not ask for directions. In my family we take tradition very seriously and therefore, every year without fail, one of us hurts ourselves or one another. And by “one of us” I mean my father or myself.

We suspect this tradition began when I was just a few weeks old  and my father took a strong graceful stroke in the pool and hit the bottom -  hard. The “thunk” was audible above water. But fortunately, rather than breaking his neck he simply scraped all the skin off his nose and forehead.

Sometimes we don’t even wait until the vacation has officially started before injuring ourselves, inflicting some sort of pain moments before packing up the car. My father has mangled his hand twice now – one might suspect as a desperate measure to get out of loading up. Once, in one mighty, angry swing of the hammer he smashed his thumb into submission. More recently he nearly removed the tip of his pinkie on a mandolin slicer. For the rest of the vacation on the beach he wore a “finger condom” fashioned from latex glove fingers and rubber bands.

My own pre-vacation injury was merely a severe burn on my leg I received bumping into a pressure cooker left to cool on the floor. We were about to take off, so I spent the entire journey reporting to my parents every few miles or so how the bubbly blister was coming along.

A slightly more spectacular wound I inflicted upon myself was when my parents and I were in a seriously remote village in the northwestern-most corner of Washington state. In the shower I somehow managed to shave a huge hole in the nail of my ring finger.  It was a spectacularly bloody mess but fortunately didn’t need stitches considering the decided lack of doctors in the area.

The last two events I’ll recall (last two, promise) involve my family’s genetic inability to see past our noses. One day at the beach, a notoriously difficult spot to negotiate if you’re hard of seeing, my father stumbled blindly back to our cabin without the aid of contacts or glasses. Almost to the door, he drove his forehead into the open upper hatch of a pickup truck leaving a sizable gash just an inch above his eye. This necessarily resulted in a string of phrases my young ears should not have been subjected to.

Lastly, due to my forgetting my glasses at home and subsequently dropping one of my contacts down the drain, my parents sat on the floor of a cabin bathroom digging out under the sink to reach the drain trap. My father reached under and passed the various cleaning supplies etc to my mother. However, when he grabbed the hair dryer he swung it around too quickly and nailed my mother in the temple. It made the most amazing “crak!” My mother sat in shock for a moment, small trickle of blood dripping down her face, before becoming very angry.

It’s no small miracle that none of us have ended up in the hospital in some land far from home. But, as determined as some of us are to hurt ourselves, we are all equally determined to have fun, and always manage to succeed in this respect as well.

Read more: Family Travel, Funny Family Stories, Touring with the Parents, Travel


Llalan specializes in all things Ohio, but has funny stories from all over the US and Canada, plus a few snort-inducing ones from Thailand. And not only does she read books from around the world, she also samples beers in as many languages as possible. Favorite style: the multi-national American Double IPA.

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