High up on the list of “Vacations to Avoid” lies an entry that only a privileged few have had the opportunity to experience. Right below “Your Hotel Burning Down” and above “Eating Strange Animals” sits “Awkward Family Vacations: Someone Else’s Family Edition.” I was fortunate enough to experience one of these treacherous trips over the summer, venturing up to Duluth with my neighbors. It was all fine and dandy until the last night, when scheduling changes and shenanigans galore led to a horrible predicament.

Five people, two beds, one hotel room. Now, I’m all up for coziness in foreign places, but two of the five travelers were my neighbors’ parents. Although they are lovely people, their father had a moustache to make any 1980s private investigator jealous, and their mother is the size of Thumbelina. Old and tired, they quickly drifted off to slumber.

That would be the only drifting done that night. The sound of chainsaws filled the air, and it appeared that a large forest was being chopped down nearby. Turns out my neighbors’ parental units moonlighted as lumberjacks, as I’ve never heard snoring so loud, and once or twice thought of checking to make sure it wasn’t just a CD of bowling balls falling down flights of stairs turned all the way up.

Let’s just say that sleep eluded me that night, and it was obvious the next morning. “Did you sleep okay last night? Hope you were nice and comfy!” My assertions that I slept well were apparently obvious falsehoods, made apparent by the eggplant colored golf balls taking up residence below my eyes. Luckily I had the five-hour plus car ride home to lull me to sleep, this time with the calming tones of engine failure.