MAPQUEST AND GOOGLE MAPS WERE RIGHT! REASON NUMBER 2,033 TO NOT GO ON A FAMILY VACATION!

Yep, you guessed it is Family Vacation time! And my book club members ask why am I so adamant about not wanting to participate and I usually can say, “Let me count the ways!” Ugh!

This was a busy week for me even though I only worked 3 days, but I worked all three days. Then I would come home and retightened my hair. Go me and yes I am tired! Guess when I packed? Thursday. Wasn’t in a big hurry, because the more I thought about the actual drive from Montgomery to Myrtle Beach I felt an ominous feeling deep within me. I knew I would end up in a vehicle for too damn long and I was.

The plan was to leave at 5:00 am. Yep, I was squeezed in the vehicle with three us one seat, but you will be surprised how much grown folks will curl up when they sleep. Plus, I just couldn’t do Smoky, no matter how much I loved him. Oh, let me also preface this trip with I was up Thursday at 5 am to workout and ran errands and packed until I went to a screening with the book club for the movie The Help. I’ll blog about that experience next week. But when it comes out, make sure you go out and see it. After the movie, which started at 7 pm and ended about 9:30 pm, we went to dinner and I didn’t get home until a quarter to midnight and I had a few things to do before I went to sleep. However, I only slept 30 minutes and just got up. So folks I had no damn sleep so I just knew I would sleep the entire trip. But I didn’t. I guess I only require two hours of sleep. Sighing…We left about 5:20 am and the family trip had begun.

However and hour and 15 minutes later, we were making our first stop. And when we got to Atlanta we made another stop. This is when I noticed it took us an hour and 15 minutes to get to the GA state line, damn it I do it in an hour. And getting to the 285 bypass should have taken no more than 2 hours, but it had taken 2.5 hours. Somebody was driving to0 damn slow for the distance we had to travel. And when we had our second stop we were told we only had 70 miles from Augusta, um someone miscalculated because they left out a whole 279 miles. I was nice and ripe with annoyance and people I was just so damn tired and achy I was ready to get out of the vehicle for good. Really! And the music was not the get you hyped stuff, it was old stuff that I don’t ever remember hearing and it was too slow for driving music, but I tried to keep it together because the driver needed to be comfortable, but damn I fidgeted so much I gave myself a back ache.

When we finally stopped for something to eat, it was at McDonald’s. I do not eat at McDonald’s. I only eat at select fast food establishments because I do not waste calories. And of course we couldn’t just eat and drive, we must eat in. My cousins and I were over the whole thing we just wanted to get to Myrtle Beach. And let’s not forget we were lost which costs us about an hour. I sent an email to my book club members after being in the vehicle over 9 hours letting them know I was still in the car and I was ready to just die.

Then I go to check in for me and my sister, who is only 15 minutes away, they can’t find our reservation and I know damn well they charged my damn credit card. Oh yes, being tired means the angry, frustrated black woman comes out. And after 20 minutes of them looking they find the reservation. Want to know why they couldn’t find the reservation? Because my sister has a hyphenated name. All her fault. Oh and by this time we discover my sister is so damn lost and her GPS is giving her erroneous directions she is ready to just abandon the car especially as she is stuck in traffic. Yeah, she was ill by the time she got here because; she was lost for 2 hours. She knows Myrtle Beach like a native.

We played a good trick on my niece too funny. I wish I had pictures of her stank face.

All wasn’t lost though because we are all here together. Plus, we went to Benjamin Calabash’s seafood buffet and baby we got full! When I say they had so much stuff on their buffet I was dizzy. I literally wanted to turn around in circles in an effort to grasp the enormous amount of items on their buffet. Their crab legs were to die for as well as they clams and mussel bake, shrimp, oysters, oysters Rockefeller and oh their hushpuppies tasted like a sweet, succulent ball of cake. Yummy! It was worth the expensive ticket. Yet, I am walking around feeling fat! And greedy!

So although the day started with it doing the most, it really ended on a high note because dinner was great especially since it was with family.