The Bumpy Road to Vacation

As we have alluded to before,  sometimes, when it comes to getting ready for vacation, things don't go as planned.  Or sometimes, you may run into a few road blocks that might threaten some vactioners from joining the trip.


First example, is for the first year of OBX, Colin was almost unable to join us because he doesn't know how to swim properly and reinjured his knee while swimming with his then-girlfriend-now-wife.  He originally injured his knee by beating up some little kid*.

To the left, you can see Katie Cleaning up the popsicle

  (* may or may not be true).  The reason his presence was in question for the trip was that his doctor was worried that he would get a blood clot in his leg after being in the car for such an extended period of time.  Luckily he was cleared to go with us, and we accomodated his situation by stopping every two hours or so to allow him to walk around a little bit and wash his hands.  He thanked us by becomeing "Cranky Colin" and spilling red popsicle on the floor.

For OBX Year 2, our friend Brittany was almost unable to join us because she was having trouble getting the time off from work.  When all was said and done, she was still able to go with us but hadn't been able to get the whole week off and ended up leaving on Wednesday so she could get home in time.  As fate would have it, we ended up having to leave the house the next day as well, thanks to Hurricane Irene.

I, too, had my struggle in getting the time off from work for this year's trip to Hilton Head.  I like to request time off well in advance because I don't want to be a dick and do it at the last minute.  I followed proper protocol for requesting the time off for our vacation and even got it approved by my supervisor.  However, a couple weeks later, my supervisor came up to me saying I didn't have enough time off to allow for a full week's vacation.  When I first asked for the time off, my schedule was a Monday through Friday deal and had enough time off.  Shortly thereafter, my schedule changed and it conflicted with the amount of time I had to request off.  After Paul and I ran through the math, there was one solution to the problem.  I would have to switch shifts with someone to free up one of the days we would be gone.  Once I got that cleared up, my time off was approved for good and I was set to go.  Until a week or so later, when I received a letter from Detroit's court system, notifying me that I was being summoned for Jury Duty, and it was to start the Monday we would be gone.  A friend of ours had run into a similar situation before and said that if you just write a letter to the court letting them know that you already paid for the trip, they would probably let me get an extension for my jury time.  I sent back my information with the letter and days before we left, I got the response I was hoping for, that my extension was approved and finally was cleared to go on vacation.  The timing of my jury duty was in sync with the jury selection for Kwame Kilpatrick's trial.  That would have been fun to sit in on.

Another example, while I'm talking about the legal system almost getting in the way of vacations, is when Paul, Katie, and I took a trip in March of 2011 to Tennessee to see Nathan "Rock Lobster" Rock.  I was on probation at the time for scuffing up a cop's shoe and screaming "Thug Life"*  (*not true) and had to get approval from my probation officer to leave the state.  She liked me and allowed me to go, but I still had to jump through a few hoops beforehand.  The same was true for later that year when we went to OBX Year 2. 

Everything ended up working out each time, but as the saying goes, "Nothing worth having comes easy".  And trust me, vacation is fucking worth it.