How you can tell the summer trip is over before it starts

Nothing frightens parents more than summer vacation. Kids look forward to a few months of fun and frolic. Moms and dads wonder how they can fill ten hours a day with activities when there’s nothing good on television.

One way to fill the time is to take a summer trip. This is what my family does every summer; although a few years of moving our shit to and from Colorado Springs wasn’t much fun, we still called it a vacation because we threw in a tour of the Oklahoma City bombing site and visited that great big ball of twine.

I won’t lie and say every summer trip has always been perfect. Last year we were stranded at the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport for eight hours, finally landed in Los Angeles, 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.

But after spending the last ten summers traveling with two kids and a man who enjoys listening to the car stereo at a volume set at “Jet Liner,” I’ve learned a thing or two.

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?” and somehow 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 summer trip is over before it even begins.

10. Husband screams, “Stop kicking my seat!” for the fifteenth time upon arriving in North Carolina and you’re afraid to tell him the kids have been asleep since Ocala.

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

8. Youngest yells, “What did you call me?” every time someone talks 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 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 summer trip is over?

1. Wine no longer helps.