Summer vacation is normally the thing most families look forward all year long.  Most kids have the mentality that getting through the school year with passing grades is more because if they don't they won't get to go anywhere during the summer than because it's just what you're suppose to do if you don't want to grow up to be a bum....according to my grama.

When I was a kid we were poor, like super poor, but of all the things I didn't have my folks were pretty damn good at taking trips.  They didn't all turn out the way we planned, but they were unforgettable either way. Here's a story from my childhood that my family calls "The Vacation from Hell".

I don't even remember where we were going to or coming from, could have been on the way back from Buffalo Falls, not sure. What I do remember is this; My mom, dad, brother and myself load into whatever boat sized hunk of unsafe, barley running, metal road machine we had at the time.  Before I go any further, keep in mind that my dad back in the day had a really bad temper and he pissed about almost everything and not just regular pissed, like "is he going to pass out" kind of pissed.  My dad was a long haul trucker so he knew the roads in Texas pretty damn well so when he said that we were going to take a "short cut" to whatever our destination it sounded pretty cool.  At first we're driving on a regular paved road and during the coarse of this "short cut" my dad makes a turn that seems like any other turn from one regular road to another.  However, after traveling on this regular paved road for too long to even consider turning around the road turns into dirt.  If we had been on a dirt road for a few minutes and then back to a normal road no one would've even noticed, but that's not what happened.  We drove on a dirt road for hours.  The cars AC had gone out on the regular but we were poor and used to it so we just rolled the windows down and it was tolerable.  Now we are on a dirt road, not driving very fast because, ya know...it's dirt...and because of all the dirt we have to roll the windows up.  Turns out those windows didn't have good seals and the dirt was choking us out, getting in our eyes and making us look like we should be on a commercial asking for sponsors.  It must've been 300 degrees in that dirt box and we were on that road for so long that we were playing a game that involved screaming at the top of our lungs anytime we thought we saw another car.  We never actually saw any other cars on that road and we were on it for a good 5 hours.  Long story short it was awful in the backseat of that car, not wearing any seatbelts, napping in the floorboard and up on the back near the back window listening to the string of profanities coming out of my dad and moms mouth for 5 hours covered in dirt and sweating our balls off the whole way.

The end.   Top that.

More From The Basin's Classic Rock