My Holiday From Hell: A Teenage Daughter’s Drunken Disaster
When Everything Went Wrong on Family Vacation
My holiday from hell began with the best of intentions. What started as a spontaneous May half-term escape quickly transformed into one of those memorable family experiences that you recount with equal parts embarrassment and amusement. The accommodation, a charming cottage borrowed from a family member, seemed like a wonderful idea on paper. However, the reality of fitting my husband, myself, and our three teenage daughters into a relatively compact space was far from ideal. “But hey,” I attempted to rally our skeptical group, “it’s near the beach – we’ll hardly be inside anyway.”
One of my daughters had attended a party the evening before our departure. She had assured us she would return home by midnight, and we had settled on beginning our six-hour drive at nine o’clock in the morning. Unfortunately, this particular daughter arrived back while I was preparing my morning tea. She was still noticeably intoxicated, and to make matters worse, she had somehow lost her mobile phone. This was the beginning of my holiday from hell.
The Search for a Missing Phone
After considerable Facebook messaging, we discovered that a friend had taken the phone to someone else’s house. The problem was that nobody could identify which friend or which house. Everyone who had been at the party was now completely exhausted, including our daughter. My husband, a self-confessed control freak, was pacing the kitchen with his morning mantra: “When I say we’re leaving at 9am, I mean we’re leaving at 9am.”
By noon, we finally set off, having agreed to make an hour-long detour to check the house where the phone might be. During the journey, our party-going daughter became unwell and vomited out of the back window. My husband swerved the car angrily into a side road while I rushed to the corner shop for water bottles to clean up the mess. A young couple pushing their perfect baby down the road threw horrified looks at us. “Don’t worry,” I shouted, “this will be your life one day.” They averted their eyes and hurried away.
Delays and Disasters Multiply
We arrived at the phone house and parked outside. Our daughter swayed unsteadily up the garden path. “She’s still drunk,” said my husband. As the front door opened, my daughter was sick on the doorstep. My husband slunk down below the driving wheel. “You deal with it,” he said.
An hour later, having mopped up, we were on our way again. Five hours behind schedule we joined the motorway, where the cars were virtually stationary. My husband, incandescent, said absolutely nothing. Everyone was starving, but no one dared suggest we should stop for lunch. This was truly my holiday from hell.
By early evening we were in Cornwall, but the cottage was near Land’s End, so we still had a way to go. “It won’t be long now,” I called merrily from the front. Moments later, the car spluttered to a stop. We ended up in a crowded pub garden at 10pm waiting for the AA, which took an hour to get the car going again.
A New Beginning After the Storm
It was after midnight when we arrived at the cottage, and despite everyone’s relief it was immediately clear it was much too small. My protestations that we would be at the beach anyway evaporated when we awoke next morning to thick fog and driving rain. By mid-morning everyone wanted to be elsewhere, a situation I hoped to improve by taking my husband to the pub for a drink.
There, we had a massive row, and he stormed back to the cottage to book a flight home. Partygirl daughter, who had realised the recovered phone was in fact broken, begged him to take her with him. We dropped them at Newquay airport the next morning, and the other girls and I went to a cafe. As we watched their plane take off, the clouds parted and the sun appeared.
“The beach!” we shouted. We raced back; every day after that was sunny, and the cottage was now the perfect size. The three of us have returned many times since; my husband and our other daughter have never been back. Looking back, I can laugh about my holiday from hell, though I’m not sure everyone else can.
