Traveling With a Neurodivergent Family: The Vacation That Never Should Have Happened

We do not vacation. I want to say that up front, so you understand exactly how far outside our normal operating procedure the events I’m about to describe actually were. We do not fly anywhere. We do not book anything more than forty-five minutes from home. We have, for the better part of two decades, treated the family vacation the way most people treat a home root canal — technically possible, definitely not something you volunteer for.

And then, one spring, I had a moment of what I can only describe as temporary insanity, in which I looked at a rental listing for a lake house three hours away and thought, we could do this. We could be a family that does this. I want you to sit with that level of delusion for a second, because I certainly didn’t, at the time.

I booked it before I could talk myself out of it. Non-refundable, because apparently my brain had also decided that commitment was the same thing as preparation. I told myself this would be good for all of us. A reset. A memory. The kind of thing families do that we had simply never gotten around to.

What actually happened was four days that I will be recovering from for the rest of my natural life, and that I now tell at parties, because if I don’t laugh about it I will have to think about it seriously, and I am simply not equipped for that today.

If you’ve ever tried to relax with this crew, you already know exactly where this is going. Pull up a chair. This one’s a doozy.

Why We Don’t Do This (Anymore)

To understand how badly this trip went, you have to understand why we’d stopped trying in the first place. It wasn’t one catastrophic event that ended vacations for our family. It was a slow accumulation of smaller disasters, each one reasonable enough on its own, that eventually added up to an unspoken household policy: we simply do not do this to ourselves anymore.

There was the beach trip where the sound of other people’s music turned into a two-hour meltdown before we’d even unpacked the car. There was the hotel stay where a change in the mattress firmness meant nobody in the family slept, including the mattress, presumably, out of solidarity. There was the theme park visit I still can’t fully discuss.

Each time, we told ourselves it would go better next time, if we just planned harder. Better snacks. A better schedule. A weighted blanket packed with the precision of a bomb disposal unit. And each time, the trip found some new, previously unconsidered way to fall apart, because that is apparently what trips do in this family, regardless of preparation.

The Last Time We Tried

The last real vacation attempt before this one had ended with us checking out a day early and driving home in near total silence, everyone too exhausted to even properly argue about whose idea the trip had been. We agreed, without ever formally discussing it, that vacations were something other families did, the way other families apparently also enjoy camping, or board games that last longer than twenty minutes without incident.

For years, that agreement held. We took day trips. We stayed close to home, close to routines, close to the specific combination of familiar things that kept everyone regulated enough to function. It wasn’t glamorous. It also worked, which mattered more to me than glamour ever has.

The Optimism That Got Us Into This

So when I found myself booking a lake house, I want it on the record that I knew better. I had years of data telling me exactly how this would likely go. And I booked it anyway, because some part of me still wanted to believe that this year would be the year we became a family that could do this without it turning into a group project in disaster management.

That’s the thing about hope. It doesn’t check your history before it shows up. It just arrives, fully formed, convincing you that this time will be different, right up until the exact moment it very much is not.

Pearls of Wisdom Hope is a wonderful thing right up until it convinces you to book a non-refundable vacation against every shred of available evidence. Ask me how I know.

The Packing List From Hell

If you have never packed for a trip like this, I want to describe it to you the way it actually felt: less like packing a suitcase, and more like assembling a small mobile command center capable of surviving any regulatory emergency, in a vehicle with a strict weight limit and a driver who was already regretting every decision that had led to this moment.

The list started reasonable. Clothes. Toiletries. Then it grew, the way these lists always do, into an inventory of every comfort item, backup comfort item, and backup for the backup that had ever proven useful in a crisis. By the time we finished, our lake house weekend luggage looked like we were relocating permanently, possibly to a different climate.

I am not exaggerating when I say we packed three different noise-canceling options, in case one failed, or was deemed unacceptable mid-crisis for reasons that would only become clear in the moment. We packed snacks in a cooler large enough to provision a small expedition. We packed a specific pillow that has, at this point, traveled more miles than some people’s cars.

The Non-Negotiables

Every family like ours has a version of the non-negotiables — the small handful of items that, if forgotten, will single-handedly determine whether the entire trip is salvageable. Ours included a particular brand of crackers, a specific weighted blanket, and a phone charger cable of an exact, apparently irreplaceable length.

I triple-checked every one of these items before we left. I still, somehow, forgot the crackers. I will let you imagine how that discovery went over, three hours from the nearest store that carried them, at nine o’clock at night, in a town that appeared to close entirely after dark.

What Actually Made the Cut (and What Didn’t)

In the end, our car contained more emergency contingency planning than the actual vacation required, and somehow still missed the one thing that turned out to matter most. That is, I have come to believe, simply the law of packing for this kind of trip. You cannot plan your way to full coverage. You can only plan your way to slightly fewer surprises.

What didn’t make the cut, notably, was my own sense of calm, which I apparently left on the kitchen counter along with any illusions I still had about this being a relaxing getaway.

The Drive Nobody Warned Us About

Three hours doesn’t sound like much until you are the one driving it with a car full of people whose tolerance for sitting still, for uncertainty, and for the specific hum of highway noise varies by the mile. We made it forty minutes before the first request to turn around. We made it an hour before someone informed me, with total sincerity, that this had been a bad idea from the start, a fact I could not honestly dispute.

Somewhere around mile ninety, the GPS rerouted us through a stretch of road construction that added forty-five minutes we did not have the emotional reserves for. I watched the estimated arrival time creep later and later, the way you watch a slow-motion car accident you are also, unfortunately, personally involved in.

Mile One Through Meltdown

The meltdown, when it came, arrived over something so small I genuinely cannot remember what it was, which tells you everything about how these things actually work. It was never about the small thing. The small thing was just the final straw on a pile that had been building since we pulled out of the driveway.

We pulled into a gas station that had clearly never anticipated hosting a family regulation session in its parking lot, and we did what we always do. We waited it out. We didn’t rush it. We didn’t take it personally. We just stood there, in a gas station parking lot three hours from home, doing the exact same thing we would have done in our own driveway, except now with an audience of confused strangers filling up their tanks.

The Gas Station Standoff

I want to take a moment to appreciate the specific kind of resilience it takes to stand in a public parking lot, fully aware that people are watching, and not care even a little bit, because you have long since run out of energy for caring what strangers think. That particular skill, I will say, is one of the more useful things this life has taught me.

Twenty minutes later, we were back on the road, no worse for wear except for the fact that I now associate that particular gas station brand with a very specific kind of trauma. We arrived at the lake house two hours later than planned, all four of us thoroughly done with the day before the day had even properly begun.

Arrival: Nothing Like the Brochure

The listing photos had shown a serene lake house with soft lighting and tasteful throw pillows. What we arrived to was a house that smelled aggressively of a candle called, I am not making this up, ‘Coastal Breeze,’ which turned out to be its own small sensory event entirely separate from anything else that day had already thrown at us.

The mattress in the main bedroom was, of course, the wrong firmness. The Wi-Fi, promised as reliable, worked exactly long enough to confirm the booking and then quit entirely for the remainder of our stay. None of this was catastrophic on its own. All of it, stacked together at the end of an already long day, felt like the universe personally auditioning new ways to test us.

The Airbnb Surprise

We discovered, upon closer inspection, that the lake the listing so proudly featured was in fact a fifteen-minute walk away, down a path the host had neglected to mention involved actual elevation. This detail, small as it sounds, turned out to be the difference between a trip built around ease and a trip built around an unplanned hike nobody had signed up for.

By the time we’d unpacked the car, assembled a passable dinner from what we’d brought, and confirmed that yes, the crackers were in fact still missing, it was already dark, and the day’s optimism had fully evaporated into something closer to grim determination.

Day One, Undone by 10 a.m.

Day one started with real promise. A good breakfast. A plan for a low-key morning by the water. We made it exactly until ten in the morning before the missing crackers became a full-blown crisis, compounded by the discovery that the promised air conditioning unit had chosen this exact week to stop functioning.

By ten fifteen, we were sitting in a rapidly warming lake house, crackerless, Wi-Fi-less, and rapidly losing the plot, and I remember thinking, with real clarity for possibly the first time all trip, that we were not going to make it four days.

Pearls of Wisdom The brochure photos never show the fifteen-minute uphill walk to the lake, the broken air conditioner, or the smell of Coastal Breeze candle wax at eight in the morning. Read the reviews. Then lower your expectations further. Then lower them again.

The Moment We Should Have Turned Around (But Didn’t)

There is always a specific moment on a trip like this where you look around and think, we should just go home. For us, it arrived on the afternoon of day two, standing in a hot kitchen with no working air conditioning, no functioning Wi-Fi, and a family member declaring, with total conviction, that this was officially the worst trip in family history — a title that, to be fair, had some real competition.

We did not turn around. I genuinely don’t know why. Some combination of stubbornness, sunk cost, and the deep, irrational belief that day three would somehow be better, purely because it hadn’t happened yet.

Rock Bottom, Vacation Edition

Rock bottom arrived that evening, when a spontaneous rainstorm knocked out power to the entire house for three hours, turning our lake house getaway into an impromptu game of who can maintain their composure by candlelight while also being extremely warm and extremely without Wi-Fi.

We sat in the dark, ate crackers we had finally, mercifully found at a gas station forty minutes away, and started, somewhere around hour two of no electricity, to genuinely laugh about how spectacularly this had all gone wrong. It was either laugh or stage a full mutiny against the concept of vacations entirely, and laughing required less energy.

The Turnaround That Wasn’t a Turnaround

The power came back. The Wi-Fi never did, not really, not in any way you could rely on. We spent the last two days of the trip doing exactly what we should have planned to do from the start: staying close to the house, keeping things simple, abandoning every ambitious plan we’d made in favor of just getting through the days without further incident.

And somehow, that lowered-expectations, no-longer-trying-to-have-a-real-vacation version of the trip ended up being the only part that actually felt like rest. We should have started there. We never do. I suspect we never will.

What You Can Say When a stranger stares during a public meltdown: “We’re handling it. You’re welcome to keep walking.“ When the vacation is clearly not going as planned: “This isn’t the trip we planned. It’s still the trip we’re on. Let’s adjust.“ When someone suggests you should have ‘just planned better’: “We planned plenty. Some of this was never going to be plannable.“ When you’re tempted to push through a bad day for the sake of the itinerary: “We’re scrapping the plan for today. A simpler day is still a good day.“ When you need to say this to yourself by day two: “This is hard right now. It doesn’t mean the trip — or we — are a failure.“

What We Actually Learned (Besides Never Trust the Photos)

We came home a day early, which by our standards is practically a triumphant on-time finish. Nobody was hurt. Nobody was banned from a lake house permanently, as far as I know. And somewhere between the missing crackers and the candlelit crackers-eating that followed, we accidentally created one of the more memorable family stories we now tell on repeat.

Here’s what I actually took from four days of chaos: the vacation nobody plans for is sometimes the one you remember most fondly, purely because it forced everyone to stop performing relaxation and just get through it together. There was no brochure moment. There was, unexpectedly, a real one, somewhere around hour two of sitting in the dark eating stale crackers and laughing at how bad it had gotten.

I’ve noticed this pattern before, actually, well beyond vacations. The moments that end up meaning the most in this life are rarely the ones that went according to plan. They’re the ones where everything fell apart and we found our way through it anyway, usually with a lot less grace than I’d have liked and a lot more laughing than I expected. Somewhere along the way I stopped measuring a day’s success by how smoothly it went and started measuring it by whether we all made it to the other side of it more or less intact.

I’m not going to tell you this means you should book the non-refundable lake house against your better judgment. My better judgment was right the whole time, and I ignored it anyway. What I will tell you is that when the trip inevitably goes sideways — and for families like ours, it usually does — there’s a version of the disaster that becomes a good story, if you can find your way to laughing at it before you’ve fully recovered from living it.

We are, as of this writing, cautiously considering trying again next year. Cautiously. With lower expectations, a backup Wi-Fi hotspot, and, this time, three separate packages of crackers, because I have learned exactly one thing for certain, and it is that.

Mother of Pearl. We survived it. We might even do it again.

Next time: we’re talking about the sibling dynamic — what it’s actually like to grow up as the brother or sister in a house built around someone else’s needs, and what that relationship looks like once everyone’s an adult.