I’m writing this from my parents’ hotel room.  My younger sister is barricaded in the one that we’re sharing next door.  Family vacations are always bittersweet.

The first vivid memory that I have of a family vacation is from when I was just barely six years old, and my sister was still in utero.  We had taken a May trip down to Walt Disney World in Florida for the week, and it was hotter than hell outside.  I remember being sticky and miserable and still fairly terrified of almost every ride, because I was an overly imaginitive and therefore skittish child, but I still fell in love with the magic that is Disney World.  Say what you will of the ills of Disney: The Big Bad Corporation, but honestly, their aim to make Disney World “the happiest place on Earth” comes pretty close to having been achieved.  If I could live at Epcot Center, I would.

However, at the time, I just wanted to be back in more temperate climes and stop sweating all over the place, and I was almost drowned at SeaWorld the day before by some teenager who stuck my face into a fountain and held me down for what felt like six hours.

Also, this was the early ’90s, and all three of us had big feathered bangs that were sticking all over our faces.  Very attractive.

But the moment that I remember was when we were in the German pavilion at Epcot’s World Showcase, and I was absolutely melting, and my dad offered to get us a root beer float to share.  It was big and beautiful and my mom took a picture of us both with spoons poised over the glass.

That is now known as the “before” picture.

The “after” picture shows my dad sort of politely grimacing, and my six-year-old self staring at the glass with absolute revulsion.

The root beer float had chocolate ice cream.

I know now that the dessert is called a Black Cow, and is in fact a very classic diner dessert.  It probably isn’t even so bad.  But at the time, when I was expecting anything other than the taste of sarsparilla and chocolate mixed together, it was the worst thing I had ever put in my mouth.

A few years later, my family of four was back in Florida, although not at Disney World.  Instead we were staying with my grandparents at a little 1930’s villa on Singer Island, and it was very peaceful and beautiful.  I’ve heard that now the island has been overdeveloped with condos — which I find to be a potentially disastrous prospect, because Singer Island actually has a very high hammerhead shark population; there were days that the beach was closed due to Shark Manifestation or Man O’War Crowding, both of which are terrifying — but back then, the beaches stretched on for miles into the horizon and the Tahiti Inn grounds let out right onto the sand.  I thought it was unexciting compared to Disney World, but still pretty.  I roped my sister into helping me build sand sculptures one afternoon far above the high tide line while my mom searched for unbroken shells in the surf, and I remember watching her, but taking photos instead of the seagulls.

Other than building those sand sculptures of mermaids with seaweed hair, I don’t remember anything about interacting with my family on that trip.  I remember eating a chocolate Killer Cake, and that was good.  And I remember the signs for the Hammerhead Warnings.  I remember refusing to wake up to watch the sunrise with my grandfather.

I wonder sometimes about the validity of taking family vacations, because somehow it seems that one person always gets their idea of heaven while another (or three others) just have to sort of suffer along.  Our next vacation, my little sister — who was all of about 2′2″ and 35 pounds — pulled the sword out of the stone at the Magic Kingdom and got to be in the afternoon parade as a princess, just like Michelle Tanner on Full House, but I just wanted to ride Spaceship Earth.  We have photos of her standing there with Merlin and Excalibur, smiling with her little gappy baby teeth like she might burst, and I’m nowhere to be found.

Our next vacation I spent being sullen and morose because I was missing my One-Monthiversary with my high school boyfriend, whose dirty sweatshirt I had stolen and insisted on wearing for the whole week.  One of the only photos that exists of all four of us together was taken on that trip in front of the big ballerina fountain at Epcot, and I’m wearing a grubby, too-big, French’s Mustard yellow ADIDAS sweatshirt with holes in the pocket.

And the next trip, my whole family were so stressed out and tetchy that I ended up running away and taking the monorail to a whole different part of WDW.

And I remember that well.  I remember standing in line alone at the Haunted Mansion, reading the engravings on the prop gravestones that line the walkway, and I hoped that my family wasn’t really angry with me.  I just needed twenty minutes alone to think — which clearly could happen best on the Haunted Mansion — and wanted to give them time to talk amongst themselves and get things sorted, too.

And I realize now that I felt like I had been pushed out of the family operations by then, because I had been away at college.  I think I only called home twice that first semester, and on the first day of that trip, I felt my own self-imposed isolation for the mistake that it had been.  I wasn’t needed anymore to make a family.  I just didn’t see then that not being needed didn’t mean that I wasn’t wanted.

So after I rode the Haunted Mansion, I came down from the exit passage and my dad and sister were standing there, just waiting to get in line.  My family still knew where they would find me.

All of my favorite family vacation photos come from that trip.