Dozens of family members on mass vacation trip? Here’s why it’s a disaster in waiting

I’ve been reading a lot on social media about families that vacation together en masse. People are sharing their trips to Walt Disney World with three dozen of their closest relatives. And photos of beach vacations show it looks like the goal of some trips was to see how many extended family members could be shoved into an Airbnb.

I’m in awe of these families. The organization it requires to pull off an event of this magnitude boggles my mind. I imagine it has to be a lot like herding cats with assorted aunts, uncles and cousins providing the meows.

One of things perplexing me the most is that I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how you would get more than three family members to agree on anything, most especially what you’re going to see, eat and do on a joint vacation. When we took our two kids to Disney World it was a constant negotiation about what we were going to experience next.

One kid wanted to ride all the roller coasters, the other one was into the shows. My needs were simple: I was into the churros. But honestly no one cared about that at all. Well, except my husband, whose vacation refrain was: “I’m being bankrupt, one churro at a time.”

When I think about adding eight, nine or, gasp, more family members into the mix, my head feels like it’s going to explode. To me it would be a hot, humid slog to the seventh circle of hell.

Things get worse when I imagine never being able to escape my extended family for days. I’m sick of my two kids and husband after one week in vacation captivity, and I know for a fact that the feeling is mutual. When he was 10, my son told me in the midst of a road trip that my personality required him to have “frequent time alone breaks.”

My feelings weren’t hurt by his statement until my daughter and husband enthusiastically agreed with him and then started sharing my most annoying moments for the next 100 miles.

It’s obvious the families that successfully vacation together must all be extraordinary people. In many families there’s a cast of characters that each come with a warning sign.

There’s the uncle who will order the most expensive meal with wine, then want to split the check when you had a grilled cheese sandwich off the kid’s menu. Or the cousins who foist their children off on you the entire trip. Sure, you love your cousins’ kids, but you didn’t know that you were going to be the vacation nanny.

One of the only ways I can think these large vacations work/survive is that it’s a longstanding tradition that no one dares to mess with. I respect that and if one of the traditions (as I’ve witnessed on social media) is a vacation chore chart color coded by family on a white board, well, to each his own. But for me that would be when I would bid the tradition an expedient farewell and be fleeing for my car or the airport.

And although I know I sound like an anti-family curmudgeon, all I have to say is that I’ve survived many tours of duty at my husband’s Texas family reunion. It’s a reunion held outside in August at a park that’s ground zero for fire ants and scorpions, where the heat is so oppressive that the family reunion T-shirt is a crop top, even for papaw, and you’re not allowed to bring any food made with mayo due to the immediate threat of death by food poisoning. (The family lore is that potato salad served at the 1974 reunion was responsible for the demise of Great Uncle Jimbo.)

So that means I’ve earned my immediate family-only travel wings — or at the very least, a vacation free of a chore chart.

Reach Sherry Kuehl at snarkyinthesuburbs@gmail.com, on Facebook at Snarky in the Suburbs, on Twitter at @snarkynsuburbs on Instagram @snarky.in.the.suburbs, and snarkyinthesuburbs.com.