How to Travel with Your Parents and Not Want to Kill Them in Their Sleep

Remember the many small indignities of traveling with your parental unit as a child? Wedged in the scratchy back seat of a car for eons. Only trees to stare at. There were never enough goddamn snacks. And everyone always acted like "Are we there yet?" was a stupid question.

Well, the scene is still fully the same for me when I travel with my parents. They try to stuff me back into my tiny toddler pants, always wanting to make the decisions and overriding what I want to do. The whole situation can really be read as parents scrambling for one last iota of control before succumbing to their inevitable mortality. I am sound enough of mind to thoroughly grasp this, and yet it is still annoying as fuck being told what to do as a grown-ass 20-something (albeit one who refuses to grow up). What's even more grating is the reminder that with every passing day, we inch closer to becoming just like these people.

Basically everything about traveling with parents sucks. But here are some tricks to cash in on free trips offered by the parentals without going completely insane.

If you're not down with this one you should just quit reading now. It's the answer to all life's prayers. Think about it. When my family travels together, it's either to some coastal locale, whether tropical or frosty and Canadian, or some sort of cobblestone-laced wandering expedition. Everyone knows being on the coast requires drinking, and if you're lucky, your family will stock the place with booze of some sort. Make use of it. Pack it in your $40 custom artisan metal water bottle. Mix it with fruit juice and no one will ever know. I have become thoroughly drunk off stolen familial coconut Malibu while at Harry Potter World with my parents' second try at having a sweet and intelligent daughter exchange student. I sipped it from my hyper-toxic death-causing orange Nalgene bottle because people were still stupid back then and didn't know any better, and no one was ever the wiser. I did this because family is much easier to handle/much more humorous when they are practically invisible due to excessive imbibing. Consider, too: if you're traveling in an area where weed is gettable, get it. (It's not too hard, especially if you're a licensed medicinal user.) When my family went to Jamaica, for example, I split off to explore Bob Marley's property and smoke some very potent weed with a bunch of other ugly Tilley-hatted tourists. Also, muscle relaxers get you high and they are legal and purchasable at any pharmacy. Failing all of this, check out mutti and poppy's medicine cabinet: it could yield a land of untold treasures for you to crush up and rail in the toilet of your shared motel.

If your family is anything like mine, family time means uninterrupted piles of 24-hour blocks stuck in each other's company. They behave as though that's not enough to make a person completely homicidal. We eat shitty continental breakfast together at the crack of dawn, rush unnecessarily off to do some activity with no actual time constraints on it, like shopping, at 10AM. Eat lunch together, sightsee together, eat dinner together, and mostly end up having a huge blowout and resenting each other for months by the end of it. If I leave their company to, say, take a leisurely extended poop, I invariably hear one of their voices yell "Where's Kitty?" As an introverted extrovert, I have no fucking time for this and often want to kill everyone by the end of day one. I mean I love my parents (I guess) but this is my version of hell. SO, I always "unfortunately" have to work a little even when I'm on vacation. "I have this deadline, so sorry!" It saves my ass (and by extension, everyone else's) to take those blessed few hours of solace with my beloved laptop and have a concrete and permissible reason to ignore everybody.

Piggybacking on the above: uninterrupted family time is excruciating for most of us, so beg off to do a little exploring on your own—pick something you know they won't be into. Some of mine include thrifting (or "flea and tick stores" as my mum refers to them) and roaming through used book stores. My parents hate these pastimes and they think I'm a filthy vagrant for indulging in them. I always invite them, though I know they won't come, and that way they can't guilt me for it.

This lil nug applies to life in general: If you do nice things for people and appear not to mind, they will like you and let you have/do whatever you want. I don't know how some people never learn this lesson but here you go. What I'm saying is, carry the luggage when needed instead of making dad do it, pay for bits of the trip if you can rather than leaning on them in full//expecting them to take care of your old ass, go fetch the ice, whatever whatever. This way, when you want to go out and fuck a local/party/not consign this entire vacation to just your family, they will be unlikely to complain about it because you did that nice thing for them earlier. You're welcome.

Which brings me to my next point. Fuck a local. What are you doing on vacation if you're not fucking a local? There is always someone to fuck, unless your parents are vacationing in fucking Berwick, Nova Scotia or some shit. Hop on Tinder/Grindr/Bumble /whatever, rewrite your bio to include the fact that you are a hot commodity whose genitals are only in the vicinity for three days, and hop to it. Do this even if you have a partner/husband/wife/unicorn. They'll never know or even suspect because you are supposed to be on a boring vacay with the fam. Trust me, getting laid makes being dragged along on Dad's birdwatching expeditions a lot more bearable, and it also weakens the aforementioned stank of impending mortality.

Maybe, and stop being a dick. Your parents only have like five more minutes to live. The older we get the less time we spend with those close to us. And while that sometimes feels like a goddamn blessing, maybe we can be trite and disgusting for a sec and try to appreciate our parents as humans with at least, hopefully, SOME wisdom to impart. So get a little tipsy with them and some of the other olds they're sure to collect along the way, and get them to tell you a story or two. And appreciate the fact that someone on the face of this earth still wants to make your dumb ungrateful ass a gratuitous sandwich.