<p>Shandys and black & tans may be good sentimentality but they don’t serve well in the face of London.
Only one thing will do. Bartender, open the freezer and give me a double shot from that bottle of raki.</p>
<p>Alu, a classic story from our family history: </p>
<p>I am about 12 and brother is 10. We’re on vacation in St Barths. My father (then a corporate wound-up-a<strong>h</strong>* type-- now profoundly changed by serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) found my brother and me playing backgammon in our hotel room-- and screamed: “I spend a huge amount of money bringing you kids on vacation to the goddamned Caribbean, and you’re sitting in the hotel room?! Put that game away and get out on the beach-- this instant!! And, goddamn it, I want you to FROLIC!!”</p>
<p>SBmom - excellent LOL moment. I love it. FROLIC or else. Your father understood the concept of a threat.</p>
<p>yeah, I’m laughing NOW, but at the time…!!</p>
<p>See also, “The floggings will continue until morale improves.”</p>
<p>Ah yes. Fathers with big vocabularies. SBMom, perhaps I should suggest medication to my dad even now. </p>
<p>I was a teenager prone to saying exactly what I thought. In one of the resultant battles with my father, he called me a “supercilious b****.” I don’t know which struck me more, the use of the word supercilious, or the fact that he swore at me. I try to avoid both with my kids…</p>
<p>Anyway, when he called me that, I took one of the peaches I was peeling at the time and threw it straight at his chest. Then I ran away from home to my aunt’s house, all over 2 miles away. But I had to walk because I didn’t have a car.</p>
<p>Innocent era in its own way, but adults were more prone to shaming the young, I think.</p>
<p>Lol, Crash! Nothing like a family vacation! And, like your family, Cheers, my parents thought it was extra, extra fun if we left in the middle of the night. Were they all crazy?! </p>
<p>These family vacations would throw my mother into obsessive-compulsive overdrive, and she’d turn into a frothing maniac by the time we finally backed down the driveway. We had our own (1965-68) version of a suburban Noah’s Ark going in the Vista Cruiser. A standard poodle, a Manchester (kind of looks like a small Doberman), a hamster, somebody had a horny toad, and a bunch of gerbils who wouldn’t stop fornicating. We may have had a couple of cats. </p>
<p>My favorite mom profanity: “No gawdamn vacation is WORTH IT!!” </p>
<p>My dad actually drove off without her at a rest stop in Nebraska. We kids stopped kicking one another long enough to notice that we were getting back onto the highway without her. </p>
<p>“Uh, Dad. I think you left Mom back at the rest stop.”
“Yeah, SO?! What’s it to yuh?!” The veins in his neck dance the Herky-Jerky. Kids resume kicking one another in the back. No seatbelts, just a clump of kids in the back with the seats down.</p>
<p>(10 minutes later…) Hey, Dad. You better go back and get Mom.
*What? Why SHOULD I?<a href=“We’re%20going%20about%2090%20mph,%20by%20this%20time.”>/i</a></p>
<p>Because you’re a fart! bravely spoken by the eldest child, Yours Truly. Besides, we were safe in the back of the Cruiser, a parsec or two out of his reach. Kids erupt in laughter. </p>
<p>Dad crosses two state lines turning the Vista Cruiser around. An hour later, we pull up and retrieve our mom, completely pi**ed off, but ready to resume the trip. My younger sister was nice enough to delay her usual hurling until our poor mother was back in the car. :D</p>
<p>AAAAAAAAHhahahahhaha!!!</p>
<p>Slugg, you kill me!!</p>
<p>All together now… “Tho-o-se were the da-a–ys!”</p>
<p>Jeeezzz…traveling in the car stories…I got a ton of those. I am the oldest of 5 kids. My dad was in the Army and we were stationed overseas while I was in high school. My parents wanted to travel but flying to and from and hotels were beyond the budget. So we drove everywhere and camped. We also left on every trip at “O dark-thirty” (military time for all you civilians) in the morning. One of my favorite family trip stories was when we where trying to find a camp ground in northern Italy one summer. When we finally found the camp ground it was dark. By the time my dad paid for the site it was pouring down rain. We set up the tent (yellow and orange, looked like a circus tent, very embarassing for a teenager) in the pouring rain in the dark. The next morning we woke up to the sound of car horns and people cussing in Italian. We got up to see what the fuss was about and found out that we had set up the tent in the middle of the camp ground road. Fastest we ever took the tent down and packed up!!</p>
<p>Needless to say, I DO NOT camp anymore…ever!</p>
<p>doddsmom:Oh, that is so funny. My worst family trip was when I was travelling to Canada with my uncle and his family. My uncle was terrified of tunnels and always studied the maps to avoid them. He missed one. We had to go through a long tunnel through a mountain, and he had his eyes squeezed shut while his wife sat beside him and guided the wheel. Then he stopped to get gas and pulled onto the highway going against traffic. Horns were blaring, and we barely missed a truck. He was driving one of those elephant station wagons and my cousins and I were squealing like crazy. When we arrived at the cabin, he hopped into bed, his fat wife sat on the bed, and the whole thing collapsed on the floor. “Jesus Christ, Helen!” I can still hear him roaring.</p>
<p>Hi Everybody…just remembering car trips makes me carsick and I’m not even prone to it…</p>
<p>Not to lower the mood or anything but I stumbled on a very intriguing, moving site that I think many of you would appreciate but I don’t want to start a thread about it (it’s not that kinda thing…) but for all who are interested in the memories of childhood (hilarious, painful, dreadful, endearing) you might find this site very interesting…<a href=“http://postsecret.blogspot.com/[/url]”>http://postsecret.blogspot.com/</a>
You might need a strong tonic for some of it, too. Anyway…</p>
<p>By the way, this is a legit project - the Wash. Post is somehow involved in it or the fellow doing it works for the Post…scroll to the bottom of the site for more info…</p>
<p>Hahhahahhah! Doddsmom and Pattyk!! 
Oh, man. Doddsmom, the joys of setting up camp in the dark…One morning, dh & I found ourselves and our kids camped on top of an anthill next to a train track. That was somewhere near Santa Barbara in a State park, and the end of the road for our family camping.</p>
<p>Another time, my intrepid parents set up camp in what looked like a perfectly lovely spot somewhere in South Dakota. The kids were all parked in the Vista Cruiser, basically so we could fight all night long and not bug our parents. They chose to sleep outside under the stars. </p>
<p>They ingeniously zipped up their sleeping bags somehow to make a double sleeping bag :::eww:: (with the aid of giant safety pins), and the next morning, they woke up to a soft rain. What each of them thought was a morning nuzzle from the other (which would have been weird enough), turned out to be a small herd of buffalo grazing next to their makeshift sleeping contraption. </p>
<p>We stopped our morning kick-boxing long enough to look out of the side window of the Cruiser and see them frozen in their sleeping bag straight-jacket surrounded by buffalo…getting rained on. My mom was the first one to make her move, as she streaked toward the cinderblock restroom (a true brick sh**house) about 50 feet away. The buffalo looked uninterested and continued to munch. :D</p>
<p>P.S. My dad, who didn’t mind the thought of being trampled to death by a herd of buffalo, simply stood up and strolled past the hulking beasties. In recognition of his buffalo-ness, they parted like the Red Sea, and snorted respectfully at him. I think he was a little disappointed that things didn’t heat up more than a couple of snorts! :)</p>
<p>Gotta keep this near the top.</p>
<p>Today, cleaned my clams from the 4th. Do you prefer to eat the clam’s stomach raw or cooked, or just tossed away? </p>
<p>Once again, I’m still smarter than The clam. Maybe next year, they’ll best me. </p>
<p>Drinks on me. Monarch for all.</p>
<p>Stomach eater here (although I don’t like the sound of saying that; and I’ll pass on the drinks, haven’t had breakfast yet :)) Cooked, though. Steamed or fried. I don’t get the folks who don’t eat the stomachs. In my family, we call fried clams without the stomach “fried fried,” because there’s no “there” there.</p>
<p>can never get the frying time right. Its either too doughy or too tough. I end up dipping clams in boiling water for a ~10-20 secs (color change) then shoot them down. </p>
<p>Have you tried NW’s googyduck, gapers(blue)? A small one is 1 pound and a food pouch of 1/3 of the mass and a neck is obscene. </p>
<p>I’m the only one in famiy that likes them dual shell moluski. sigh. I need someone to enjoy them with.</p>
<p>I wonder why I like oysters and not clams? Doesn’t seem to make sense, does it. </p>
<p>Unless it has something to do with the number of bloody marys I’d had just before the first time I tried each of them…</p>
<p>Cur, We had a two tone Vista cruiser and a Bug. When I dated, the Cruiser seemed to be a bit of an overkill and the Bug just didn’t seem polite.</p>
<p>Moot. I let the critters swim a little in the mary. Adds a certain touch to the drink and proves to ASPCA that I’m merciful. Did you know that you can slice oysters but not clams?</p>
<p>Off to make some currant-gooseberry jam, which I can’t eat. (type ll)</p>