How you can tell your family vacation is over…before it starts.

Husband, two kids, and I are traveling up the Pacific Coast Highway this summer. Why? Because there’s nothing good on television.

First we had to get there. Tampa to Los Angeles took three lifetimes and one annoying Lindsay Lohan movie. We spent the day in the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport because American Airlines decided at the last minute that our plane’s engine looked too much like Swiss cheese. As a result, the Robinson Clan didn’t get to see much of Los Angeles.

Too bad, because I really wanted to show the kids what happens with little talent and the right hair care products, but enough about the Jonas Brothers. We’ll learn that lesson at a later date.

We finally landed in the City of Angels, drove to Santa Barbara, and fell asleep. After a few hours drooling on ourselves, we woke up to a wind chill factor colder than Buffalo, and I immediately wondered what home, a bottle of wine, and a few dozen tranquilizers would feel like.

Here is what I learned.

A vacation, it’s often said, is looked forward to with anticipation, experienced with discomfort, and remembered with nostalgia.

Great. A $4500 bowel movement.

Yet every year, families load the minivan with DEAR books, Disney DVDs, Raffi CDs and enough alcohol to choke a horse. We pretend not to hear the nine hundred variations of “Are we there yet?” between here and there. And somehow we manage to get through it.

If you are one of the millions of college-educated gluttons for punishment clogging up our interstate highway systems all over this great country, here is how you can tell your vacation is over before it even begins.

10. Husband screams, “Stop kicking my seat!” for the third time upon arriving in San Francisco and you’re afraid to tell him the kids have been asleep since Big Sur.

9. You start referring to the GPS as that ignorant whore. Husband defends her and blames every wrong turn on bad acid you took back in 1992.

8. Youngest yells, “What did you call me?” every time someone speaks in a language he doesn’t understand. You don’t have the heart to tell him the tour group leader is speaking English.

7. Husband accuses the kids of passive aggressive tendencies because they constantly move in for hugs. When they reach for your love handles and wink, you believe he has a point.

6. Dinner in Chinatown tastes suspiciously like cat. Vegetarian kids don’t care and ask for more ketchup.

5. Alcatraz is sold out and you argue with the attendant that “our prison system really is screwed up when an overworked mother-of-two can’t even buy her way in.”

4. After two days, you can’t afford anything more than McDonalds.

3. The kids start making sense.

2. You sing along with the Jonas Brothers. Twitter and Facebook friends no longer respond to updates.

And the number one way to know your family vacation is over?

1. Wine no longer helps.