Choose Your Own Adventure

How do you choose to tell your story? When you recall experiences, vacations, or even the events of the day, do you focus on the laughter and opportunities? Or do you emphasize the challenges and horrible meals you had along the way? Even more, do you exaggerate your misfortunes to make the tale more intriguing and/or gain a laugh or two?

If we focused on the good when telling our tale, how would that change the collection of stories that make up our life? Imagine having the power to choose the beginning, middle and end to your own biographical novel. Your own personal Choose Your Own Adventure superpower!

Choose Your Own Adventure. What other child of the late 80s remembers these coveted books? The CYOA series gave me and my fellow young reader friends the power to choose how we wanted the story to end by providing various paths to choose from. For overachievers, like myself, these books gave us the ability to read all endings and choose which we preferred comparably (mine was usually the happier, less scary one – big surprise). Such a cool concept for a book and everyone’s dream for their own reality – the ability to see where our given paths lead and make life choices accordingly.

But alas, we do not live within a 1980s-chapter book. Each decision we make is a leap of faith with no guarantee of where that journey will take us. Although, we do not have the ability to foresee our destiny, we do have the power to choose how we look back at our journey and what elements we highlight along the way.

The following is a retelling of a recent journey my own family took: a road trip to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina from Massachusetts. I am writing it as 2 different stories, when really, they are one tale told from 2 different perspectives. Each version spotlights factual occurrences of our “Andrews Fun Family Vacation 2022”.

The Great Escape to South Carolina

A Choose Your Own Adventure

One for the Books

And then I exhaled. It had been a long journey to get here but I had found my way and it felt like home. Everywhere I looked the landscape was covered in various shades of lush green foliage. From large leafed monsteras and strong aged oak trees draped in Spanish Moss to tall pine trees and wide stretching fingers of palm leaves. Garden beds overflowed with color, and I marveled at the vitality they brought out in me just by being in their presence.

The air was filled with the melodic sound of varying bird species. Although I am not aware of all the species of birds inhabiting the South Carolina Island, I distinctly picked out the song of a cardinal within moments of my arrival. I searched the trees and branches surrounding the small screen in porch of our condo until I saw him land on a fence post just outside the porch.

The sight of a cardinal has always brought me hope and joy for the future. The frequency of appearance tends to heighten in times when I am regaining momentum toward a life goal or digging myself out of an emotional circumstance. This Hilton Head sighting of my red feathery friend was a welcome sign in a place I had never been before.  Something familiar among all that was new.

I love it here.

The realization came to me without warning and with strong conviction.  Within hours of being on Hilton Head Island, I knew I had found a new home in this resort-like town.

The week ahead of me was semi planned out without the heavy feeling of obligation. I was looking forward to time spent at the pool and on the beach. I had visions of family bike rides and mini golf competitions, shopping at boutiques, outdoor restaurant dining and meeting friends for drinks. But most of all, I was looking for a reset and inspiration to begin writing again.

Initially, this is exactly how the week proceeded. The younger kids pool hopped from one of the many resort pools to another while the older kids went for walks and bike rides. Jacob and Malia explored the resort and beach on their own or relaxed beside me on lounge chairs. Rich, in his typical “I can’t sit still” manner, ventured to get groceries or walk the resort. Each of us fell in love with this corner of the world as the days progressed. And each of us were getting what we needed out of a week away from our day-to-day life at home.

Midway through the week, the weather report called for the coolest day. We decided to take the opportunity to venture off island to Beaufort, a sleepy town I have admired from afar via Instagram feeds and real estate sites. Beaufort sits on and among the sea islands of Southern South Carolina. The historic downtown has a long stretch of quaint shops, boutiques and restaurants with a waterfront park that runs just beyond them. Horse drawn carriages make their way along the streets giving historical tours of the town and adding to the slow-paced ambiance of the low country. Beaufort is quaint and southern in all the right ways.

Once again, Rich and I found ourselves imagining a life outside New England and agreed, when the time was right, this was where that life would be. Whether it is the resort-style living of Hilton Head or the small southern town feel of Beaufort, this Southern area of South Carolina would someday be home.

Amidst the relocation dreaming, I began to feel signs of a cold coming on. As the day progressed, my nose began to run, and my head took on the heaviness only extreme congestion and a whopper of a cold can provide. I tried to ignore it, thinking the cause had to be allergies from all that bloomed around me. However, as we headed back to Hilton Head my symptoms progressively turned for the worse.

We were halfway through the week, with so much more I wanted to do. I was determined to not ruin what had been the perfect get away.

The first day of feeling ill, I pushed my way through being the best trooper I could be. The boys were off on a fishing trip for the day while the girls and I jumped from one activity to another trying to keep ourselves busy. We started by the pool, where I sat alone with a stack of tissues watching Carolyn splash as she made friends with kids her age. We ventured to the beach and then to a shopping center and finally to a waterfront park. I pushed and I pushed, and I took cold medicine. I pushed until I could no longer resist the desire to sleep it off.

Our last day in Hilton Head was spent either napping in my bed or sitting in my favorite spot on the screened in porch just listening. Listening and reflecting. I was disappointed that I never got my day at the beach, or to meet friends with Rich for a drink. However, while I sat on the porch and assessed my vacation, it was one of my favorites. The week was filled with adventure and relaxation. Togetherness and alone time. My reflections conjured up dinners around the table full of belly laughs and good food, outdoor time with an abundance of sunshine and long walks and dreaming of what our future would look like in the South. When I recall all this and the ridiculousness of the road trip part of the vacation, it overshadows the tissues, cold medicine and COVID tests.

Hilton Head… you haven’t seen the last of me.

I Will Never Do This Again!

I hate driving. I absolutely loathe it. The preparation. The planning. The lack of sleep. There is never anywhere on the road that fits my eating limitations. It is the absolute worst way to travel. Yet, once again I find myself filling up my car with snacks and entertainment to get us through the endless drive in the pursuit of sunshine and greenery.

At 9pm on April 16, the Andrews family piles into our minivan for our long-anticipated trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina. The late departure was by design. Our theory was by leaving after dinner, we would get through most of the driving in the evening while the kids were asleep. As the sun came up – the kids would awake, and we would head to Cracker Barrel for our traditional Andrews family road trip breakfast as one big happy family. One of our favorite hearty breakfast traditions would be just the fuel we needed to get us on our merry way singing songs and other fun shit like that. We thought it was a great plan….

As we pulled onto 128 heading South, the sky opened, and rain began to pour down in torrents making visibility difficult. Rich immediately began to curse our luck and lack of planning as I turn to my weather app and confirmed the rain was set to follow our path for the next few hours. With no other choice, we continued at a reduced pace due to the unexpected conditions.

As the night wore on and the soft snoring drifted from the back seats up to Rich and me, we began to lose steam and quickly realized as nice it was to have the kids sleep most of the way, it did not help us parents who also needed our sleep. We were exhausted and fought every minute to stay awake – giving in to steal 1-hour naps, 2 separate times, at rest stops in the middle of the night. We had officially set our timing back before we had even really started to make progress.

Somewhere between Pennsylvania and Virginia, in the early morning, we found our Cracker Barrel.

Upon arriving in the infamous Cracker Barrel country store, I ushered the kids through the down-home goods to the bathrooms for relief. My youngest, 6-year-old Carolyn, and I joined each other in the stall. I instructed how I would hold her above the seat to avoid touching any of surface of the well-travelled bathroom. As Carolyn hovered over the toilet seat, she began recounting in detail all the toys she saw along her way through the store. Which ones she NEEDED to buy before we left and why she MUST have them. Suddenly, her big eyes looked up at me in shock. “I peed my pants” she tells me. “But how is that possible?” I ask… and then I see the puddle forming at the base of the toilet. Evidently, Miss Carolyn failed to pull her underwear down completely in her haste to discuss what she had seen as we passed through the store. In her compromised hovering position, her urine had trickled down her leg soaking her underwear forming a puddle below… right next to my sneaker. Aborting my “don’t touch anything” mission, I helped my baby girl remove her underwear in the cramped quarters of the bathroom stall and dispose of them in the trash. She got redressed and we washed up good before joining the others at the table.

As my family relished the release from the confine of the car and the greasy breakfast goodness that tasted like heavy cheesy memories of trips gone by, we laughed and debated who would get the last biscuit. Carolyn, however, was not so delighted. Her pancakes were too well done for her liking. We doused the doughy circles with syrup and encouraged her to just have a few bites. She complied for a bit until she began gagging and threw it up all over herself and the table. And that was when I lowered all expectations of the trip going forward.

The rest of the drive was long and draining. We began to reassess our timing for the trip back at the end of the week, while I began dreading the return before the vacation even began.

Hilton Head Island was everything I had hope it would be. From the abundance of green vegetation to the warm rays of the sun, I felt myself easily relaxing to the island vibes that exuded from abundance of life in my surroundings.

Rich and I were careful to plan out our week ahead without over planning. I rented bikes and envisioned lazy days biking to the pool or beach and back without any definitive agenda to follow.

What I conveniently forgot when booking our bike rental was, Jackson never really learned how to confidently ride a bike. Rich and I are fantastic parents but there are certain aspects of parenting that we just suck at finding time for. Bike riding is one of them. On our first day with our bikes, we barely made it past the condo before Jackson was consumed by tears and Rich was grumbling about what a horrible time it was to teach him to ride. Determined to get passed this hurdle, I ignored them both and continued to a nearby empty lot with Carolyn and her training wheels.

The weather in Hilton Head was not as hot as I hoped, and only 2 of the days were worthy of a beach day. With the first half of our week forecasted to be cloudy and cool, I reserved the last few days as ‘my days’. These were going to be spent on the beach, in the sun, with a book in my hand.

And then it hit…

It started as the sniffles. Something that could easily be blamed on the abundance of vegetation in the area. I began to wonder if we had contracted COVID (as one does these days with any oncoming symptom) and dismissed it as coincidental.

The boys had booked a deep-sea fishing trip and the girls had a day at the beach ahead of us. We were on our final days of vacation and although both Carolyn and I weren’t feeling our best, we still had things we wanted to do. We ventured first to the pool where Carolyn splashed around, and I tried to sit on a lounge chair as far away from others as possible. I was so afraid to get anyone else sick and in the back of my mind started plotting out the purchase of a COVID test. As the pool area began to crowd and I found it impossible to keep my distance from other families, the girls and I followed the wooden boardwalk to the beach where we walked along the shore in search of the perfect seashell. It was cool, windy, and very cloudy – we aborted the beach mission soon after it began. Disappointed that our beach day had not worked out, I tried to save the day by taking the girls to a nearby shopping center while we waited for the boys to return from fishing. The heady feeling from my cold got the better of me.

After an attempt to mask both Carolyn and I, I realized not only was I not up for shopping but felt irresponsible for exposing the others in the stores – whether it was a common cold or COVID, I didn’t want to spread the impending onsetting illness. I had reached the end of my rope. Between trying to keep a 6-year-old with a cold and a 15-year-old with PMS entertained as my own health and spirits plummeted at the demise of my ruined vacation, I just wanted to go back to the condo and crawl into bed. I resorted to a park bench by the marsh while Carolyn played at the playground.

As I sat at the picturesque waterfront park listening to Carolyn hack up a lung and Malia complain about her limited shopping time – the good of this trip began to dissolve in the negativity. The next day, my last day on HHI, I spent in bed trying to overcome the severe cold I had finally succumb to. The COVID test was negative. It was, indeed, a good old fashion whopper of a cold/flu situation that I blame heavily on the long ass drive to get there.

On our ride home, I vowed to never take a road trip with my husband again. And I mean it this time!

The Path I Choose

Everything in this article happened on our trip and our vacation would not have be complete without both sides of the story. If we had not driven or if I had not gotten sick or if the weather would have been more consistent. If any or all these circumstances had been different, the journey certainly would have been a lot easier, but I cannot imagine I could have left with any more appreciation for our little getaway to Hilton Head Island than I have now.

As I sat on the porch on our last day, the recognition of the choice presented to me became abundantly clear. I could go home disappointed with losing half my week or I could hang on tight to all that went right throughout the week. The choice was mine. I had the power to choose my own adventure.

When I look back on my time at HHI, I smile. It was truly one of the most magical places I have ever been. The life and vitality that encompass the island instantly drew me in and provided the respite I so desperately needed. There has never been a place that captured my spirit more or felt so intimately like home than Hilton Head Island. I am infinitely grateful for the opportunity to spend time there as a family.

In the end, it is everything that went right that makes this adventure one for the books. This is the story I choose as part of my personal Choose Your Own Adventure book. I will keep the rest too, but only for comic relief.