I've just returned from a week-long family vacation. My relatives on my mother's side of the family made a trek out to the mountains of North Carolina. The whole group of us included my two grandparents, my parents, my aunt & uncle and two cousins, another uncle, my sister and her husband, my mate, and me. A total of thirteen people, plus our eight dogs we brought along with us. We rented two large cabins for our group to stay in during the week.
As far as I can remember, my family has never taken a vacation with all of us together before. Considering this was a first-time experience, it probably went better than I should have expected, but there were definitely some issues. Upon arriving in North Carolina, most of the family members already had ideas in their heads for what each person wanted to do while they were there, but nobody actually took the time to plan ahead or create a schedule. As a result, a lot of the activities were just kind of spur-of-the-moment. It caused some problems - but I'll get back to that later on in the journal.
Before leaving for the trip, the biggest thing I wanted to get out of it was to spend time with one of my two cousins (we'll call him "Joe" for the purposes of this journal). Joe has basically been my best friend all my life and was more like a brother to me growing up. I haven't been able to see him much ever since I moved to Florida eight years ago, so I was looking forward to hanging out with him and playing some video games. I brought my PS3 with me so that I could show him my favorite game, Heavy Rain. It's a short game, and we expected to be sitting around the cabin for a good part of each day, so I figured we'd have plenty of time to get through the game.
I also thought it would be nice to spend time with the rest of my family as well. Except for my one uncle, they were all very "present" when I was growing up. We all used to live within a few blocks of each other, so it's been very disconcerting since my parents and I moved. I used to see them all at least once a week, but for the past eight years it's been once a year or less.
Sunday:
We all got to North Carolina on Saturday, so the first full day of activities we had was Sunday. My sister and her husband, one of my cousins, my mate, and I woke up early to go out on a hike to some waterfalls. The view on the hike was beautiful. Most of the trail ran along the river, and there were three different sets of waterfalls we went to. I was hoping Joe would go with us too, but he wanted to sleep in instead. I was kind of disappointed, since it would have been nice to walk and talk with him that morning, but oh well.
It made me upset. It's not okay, and no longer how long "it's been that way", it's not going to make it okay. I live with my parents. It's not just something that's part of my past that I can accept and move on from. They are part of a struggle that I deal with every day. Yeah, I know my parents could be worse. But I can't just shut up and "deal with it", because I would explode if I had to just bottle everything up inside. Just because they aren't the worst parents in the world doesn't make it right, and it doesn't mean it isn't extremely frustrating and destructive for me. My sister doesn't even know about half the things my parents have done to me, or how they treat me on an everyday basis. She hasn't lived at home for about 9 years. She even stayed behind when the rest of us moved to Florida, though she later decided on her own to move down to the state. She completely missed out on the worst of what I've dealt with.
I don't think she has any right to tell me how I should feel about it, honestly. :/
After we got back from the hike, Joe was still at the cabins. Joe, a few others, and I sat out on the porch for a while, enjoying the weather and quietness of the forest outside. We sat there without talking for at least half an hour or so, and then I got bored. It was quiet and not much else was going on, so I thought it might be a good chance to play video games with Joe. I went inside, expecting Joe to come in with me (as we tend to stick around each other when we're together), and turned on my PS3. Joe didn't come into the cabin, so I put on a game and played by myself for a while. The TV was directly on the other side of the porch wall, and he could see me playing games through the front window.
I played games by myself for a couple hours by the time Joe decided to come into the cabin where I was. He sat down next to me to watch me play, and talked a bit about the game I was playing. I asked him if he wanted to play games now, and if I should put on Heavy Rain, since that was the game I wanted to play with him. He said "No, I kind of just want to sit out on the porch while the weather is nice. We should play games sometime when it rains." I said okay, though I was disappointed. I knew we wouldn't have a lot of time to play games with everything else going on, and it wasn't supposed to rain until the end of the week. Not to mention, rainy days were far more likely to drive everyone else indoors and make a noisy environment where we couldn't play games anyway.
So I continued to play the game I already had on. Even though Joe said he wanted to go out on the porch, he kept watching my game for about an hour. I asked him several times if he wanted to play games or go out on the porch. He kept telling me he wanted to go out on the porch, but would then continue to sit there with me. Eventually I told him, "If you want to go out on the porch, go out on the porch. I'm going to put Heavy Rain on, and if you're going to sit here with me, then we're going to play the game I wanted to play with you." Again, he said he wanted to go out on the porch, but ended up staying inside with me. But by the time we got to that point, we were only able to play for a few minutes before the rest of the family came in to make dinner, and we had to shut the game off. Again, I was disappointed, because we could have played a lot longer if he would have just made up his mind about what he wanted to do and stopped jerking me around.
That night, I vented to my mate about the situation. He asked me if maybe I was just pushing the video games too much, and yeah, I can see how it might look that way. But the thing is, Joe and I had talked about this trip long before we ever got there. I made it very clear to him that all I really wanted to do on the trip was be able to play games with him - particularly Heavy Rain. Joe and I had discussed which games to bring along beforehand and everything. And he said he wanted to play games with me too. This wasn't just something I surprised him with at the last minute.
I was disappointed, but I could understand that Joe might just want to enjoy the first day of vacation, so I swallowed my feelings and told myself to relax.
Monday:
Monday was mostly spent hanging around the cabins. Pretty much the entire day was quiet, with some of the family out in the city doing something else, and the others sitting out on the porch doing nothing. Again, I sat out with them for about an hour before I got bored. I asked Joe if he wanted to play games with me, and he said he'd rather just sit out on the porch. This time, he actually did stay out there. So I ended up going inside and playing games by myself for several hours before the day ended.
And again, I was disappointed... even more so this time. It would have been the perfect day to play games together, and we would have had all day, but Joe obviously preferred sitting outside literally doing nothing but staring into space. Even beyond being disappointed... I felt hurt that he didn't want to hang out with me, especially after he said he would.
Tuesday:
On Tuesday, we took a ride on a train. My mate loves trains, so I mostly went along because of him, but it was fun. My dad, grandpa, one of my uncles, my mate, Joe, and I all went on the train. It was a short trip to a nearby city; I think it was 3 hours total, round-trip. Halfway through, we stopped and ate lunch at a decent place by the river. The view from the train was very pretty.
We had some quiet time later that evening, so again I asked Joe if he wanted to play games with me. He said no, and wanted to watch some South Park episodes instead.
That night, I had tried to figure out what the planned activity was for the next day. (Since nobody felt like it was a good idea to plan ahead, I often had to ask 5 people before I could figure out what was actually happening.) When I went to bed, it was understood by just about everyone that the plan was for my sister and her husband to go hiking on their own, and almost everyone else was going out antique-shopping. Joe and I were supposed to be staying at the cabins to watch over the dogs since we weren't interested in the shopping - I was sure that Wednesday would be a good day to finally play some video games together.
Wednesday:
My mate and I got up early, not sure what time everyone else was leaving for their activities. We ate breakfast and hung around, waiting to see what was going on. A couple people mentioned that my sister had changed her mind about where she wanted to go hiking with her husband, but I wasn't concerned since I wasn't going with them.
We were up and awake for maybe half an hour to an hour before, quite suddenly, everyone started piling into the car with my sister. I asked someone what was going on, because I thought she was going hiking with just her husband. I asked there different people what was going on, and nobody was able to tell me what was happening or where they were going, even as they were getting in the car. I finally stopped and asked my sister what was going on, and she said that a large group of them were going hiking now, and the others were still going antique-shopping.
Joe showed up and headed toward the car, and I asked him if he was going. He said yes. There went my plans for the day.
I wasn't ready to go out on a hike, because nobody told me it was happening. Both my mate and I were completely left out of these plans, and didn't find out until everyone was already in the car and ready to pull out of the driveway. Nobody cared to let us know or ask us if we wanted to go.
I got really upset by that point... if it wasn't bad enough that Joe didn't seem to care about what I wanted to do, nobody else seemed to care either. At this point, I pretty much accepted the fact that I was never going to get to play games with Joe this week. I spent the rest of the day in my room. I didn't want to see or talk to the others. But at least I had my mate with me, and we both could commiserate with being left out.
It rained Wednesday evening.
Thursday:
On Thursday, a group of us went to the Biltmore Estate. It's supposed to be the largest home in the United States. Very elaborate and fancy. It felt a bit like going to England for a day. The view of the mountains from the house was wonderful. We toured the house and walked through the gardens.
It's not really my "thing", but I thought it was enjoyable all the same. It would have been nice if they had allowed photography inside the house.
Joe comes up to me that night and says he isn't sure he wants to go canoeing. He tells me that we could stay at the cabin and play Heavy Rain.
This is the first time during the whole week that he's expressed interest in playing games with me at all - and he waited until the second-to-last day of the trip to do it. Needless to say, I felt... angry. I told him I'd think about it, but that it was kind of too late to decide he wanted to play the game now. It's at least a 9-hour game, and it would be hard to squeeze that into one day, under the circumstances. If we had any hope of finishing it before the end of the week, we'd have to make time for it, and we'd have to start right then.
So I finally got him to sit down and play Heavy Rain with me for a couple more hours... He spent most of that time making fun of my favorite character and talking about how he just wanted to kill off the people in the game.
We got maybe 1/4 through the game. When I was getting ready to go to bed that night, I was then forced with the decision to choose between going canoeing with my mate tomorrow or playing games with Joe. It ticked me off that Joe was forcing me to choose between two things I really wanted to do, but in the end I decided I was going to go canoeing. Joe didn't care about playing games with me when he had plenty of opportunity to do so before, so why I should I go out of my way to spend time with him when HE decides it's convenient?
Friday:
It rained Thursday evening, so our canoeing plans were cancelled. Instead, we decided to go to a Nature Center, which was basically like a small zoo. I thought that also sounded like a lot of fun, so I still wanted to go. Joe acted like he had never mentioned or even considered the option of staying at the cabin to play games that day; I was glad I hadn't set my hopes up on playing games. So he went along to the Nature Center with the group of us.
The Nature Center was probably my favorite activity of the week. There were reptiles, otters, owls, wolves, foxes, coyotes, cougars, bobcats, bears, deer, and farm animals at the Nature Center. I like watching the animals, even if half of them were sleeping.
We left to go back to Florida early the next morning.
Summary / TL;DR
Overall, I just had mixed feelings about the whole vacation.
North Carolina was a beautiful place to visit. The weather was great, the environment was great, and I had fun doing the activities around there. I was glad my mate could go with me, because it probably would have been worse without him.
The whole point of the vacation was to spend time with the family members we don't get to see very often though, and in that respect, I felt like it failed miserably. Since we were housed in two different cabins (that were separated by a long, steep hill), it was difficult to get together. I barely spent any time with my aunt and uncle. I hardly did anything with Joe. Even when the whole family was together, the only thing everyone wanted to talk about was how senile my grandparents are getting. And when everyone is all together, they all try to talk at the same time, just trying to be louder than everyone else until you can't even hear anything.
It just would have been a lot better if I could have actually spent more time with the people I went there to see.