The year was 2009 and it was the very first big vacation we took with Justin's parents & his sister & her family. We rented a cabin at the coast. It was a nice, big cabin with 2 bedrooms, a loft, a separate little guest house, and a hot tub. The place was awesome! It had a huge wrap-around deck and the cabin was high enough up the road that you could see the ocean while sitting on the deck.
The hubs & I went into it knowing things may be stressful with his sister & her family. At the time, his sister was on the downswing in her marriage so she was always in a foul mood. Her entire attitude played on the misguided delusion that she needed to put other people down to feel better about her own crappy life. The tension between her and my mother-in-law was palpable and things got even worse when my brother-in-law forbid my sister-in-law to drink any hard alcohol on the trip.
The first night there, my niece, nephew, and the extra kid they brought w/ them were all being terrors. They were messing with the settings on the hot tub and generally wreaking havoc every way they could. Since their parents weren't inclined to do anything about their behavior, I took it upon myself to scold them when necessary, but I couldn't do much more than that & the kids knew it. That made their behavior 100 times worse and made the trip miserable for Trinity b/c when she misbehaved, I actually followed through w/ a punishment while the other kids were left to run amok.
At dinner that first night, my mother-in-law bbq'd a delicious meal for all of us. As we were all putting our plates together, my sister-in-law made a snip about having margarine instead of real butter. This became a huge, blown-up argument between my mother-in-law and sister-in-law as they argued the health benefits of one over the other, then argued about whether or not that was the kind they used when my sister-in-law & husband were young, and on it went throughout the evening. Once my sister-in-law finally let the subject go, she ate inside while the rest of us ate outside, cracking jokes about butter the rest of the night.
The next day we walked down to the beach and had a good time together. Things were going great until I decided to be a dumb ass and lose my glasses in the ocean. Without a spare pair, I had to try to make the best of the fact that I could only see blurs. That and I felt really stupid for losing them in the first place. My mother-in-law and I determined I wouldn't really notice my blurry vision if I drank enough of her trademark strawberry daiquiris. So we spent the rest of that afternoon and evening as drinking buddies. This made my sister-in-law insanely jealous. That's when she broke the no hard alcohol rule, which pissed off her husband and to the point that he went to their room to watch tv and stayed there the remainder of the weekend.
We ended the trip with another walk on the beach, then all loaded up into our respective vehicles and headed home. Like I said, it was a horrible vacation, but gave us fodder for several running family jokes. Particularly the joke about butter.
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