on family vacations

So I just got back from a family vacation to Boston. On the whole it was an okay trip I suppose. I think Boston is great, and I like my family most of the time, but somehow the combination of the two is, as a chemist might say (not that I would know since I haven't taken a chemistry clsas in ten years), reactive. This is not a recent ephiphany of mine; I distinctly recall a diatribe about an ill-fated family trip (not even a full vacation!) to Chicago that I posted to a previous blog that was so old that I had to use an HTML editor to add postings. (Perhaps someday I will be unlazy enough to dig them out and repost some of those entries here, although if I recall correctly, that blog was fairly depressing and consisted mostly of rantings about how much I hate everything. In other words, not wholly dissimilar from this one. Additionally, if I'm being unlazy, I think a higher priority should be actually posting to this blog with any sort of frequency. Now that I think about it, though, reposting old blog entries sounds like considerably less work that writing entirely new entries, so maybe I could just do that and avoid that pesky unlazyness altogether.)

Anyway, I think part of problem with vacations is the fact that being around the same three people 24 hours a day for a week is bound to lead to trouble, especially when a number of those hours are spent couped up in a small hotel room. Another big factor is that my parents are just fairly incompatible with city life. This trip I finally realized how it's possible for them to be content to live in my little hometown. They were always complaining about walking too fast, or too far. "Let's not go there, there's too many hills." And they have no taste for adventure, either. Of course I like to have a reasonable idea of where I am and how to get around, but I'd be content to just wander around a city with no specific destination in mind. Not mom and dad. "Better turn around, looks like we're getting away from the touristy area!" One night we were trying to find a place to eat dinner. I wanted to wander around a bit and see if we could find an interesting place to eat. So we went outside, and my mom said, "Oh no! The convention center is right here! I'm sure everything will be really expensive. We need to just go back to that California Pizza Kitchen." (To be fair, they were also pretty tempted by that Au Bon Pain we'd seen.)