A Good Vacation is a Safe Vacation

We’ve all seen the classic vacation movies starring Chevy Chase. We know how fun and exciting a good road trip can be. But that series of movies is not the last word on family and buddy road trips.

My personal favorite is the Sponge Bob movie. Perhaps you bend more towards Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, or Little Miss Sunshine. Whatever Hollywood inspired fantasy comes to mind when you think of a road trip, they all have at least one thing in common: They all present an element of danger and a brush with the unexpected.

What those movies do not realistically depict is the aftermath of the calamities that seem so riotously hilarious at the time. Nobody walks away from a car flipping over three times. The grill that blows up in your face after dowsing it with three cans of lighter fluid is seriously going to blow your face off. The bar fight you got into with the Hell’s Angels after knocking over a row of vintage motorcycles is going to leave you injured, and in the hospital for a very long time. When you get out, everything is not going to be all right.

So before taking that two day road trip to Fun World on the opposite coast, let’s take a brief moment to be sure that the worst annoyance your family experiences is the 100^th repetition of, “This is the song that never ends.”

Auto accidents

Fully one in five people suffer some kind of injury on a vacation. Driving is only the second leading cause. Personal Injury Digest reports:

• 6 million – average number of car accidents every year.
• 3 million people are injured every year in car accidents in America.
• Around 2 million drivers experience permanent injuries every year from car accidents.
• 40,000 people lose their lives every year due to major accidents while driving.

Familiarizing yourself with the features of the car you will be driving can mitigate these risks. Swap drivers frequently to insure plenty of rest for each driver. Take plenty of potty breaks to keep unspoken frustrations from building. And keep the number of a good accident attorney handy in case statistics catch up with you. Mike Pines, an expert from San Diego, lists over a dozen types of personal injury claims in the San Diego area.

Food poisoning

Auto accidents are the second leading cause of calamity on vacation. The number one cause is food poisoning. It is said that we suffer from food poisoning all the time. It is just that the symptoms are often so mild, we ignore them and move on. Vacation eating is quite different from day to day eating. On vacation, we try things that we normally would not try, and eat at questionable places that we would never eat at locally.

Depending on where we vacation, those stomach cramps after that double spicy pepper sandwich may not just be due to the fact that it was double spicy peppers we were eating. Restaurants that cater to tourists might tend to take short cuts in food safety for the sake of feeding more people, faster, and cheaper. If you are not familiar with the lay of the land, seek reputable local recommendations. If the locals don’t eat there, neither should you.

Dangerous activities

Everyday, the ER fills up with people injured in ways they would rather not talk about. They are ashamed to accurately recount the details of how they came to be injured because they were doing something epically stupid. For some reason, people see vacation time as the perfect opportunity to try something that, on another day, they would consider epically stupid.

There is nothing particularly stupid about skiing unless you are afraid of heights and have a terrible sense of balance, and poor depth perception. At that point, you should really be questioning why you are strapping on those skis. Is rock climbing really a good fit for your vertigo? Does a second trip on the levitating, triple loop roller coaster make sense with your blood pressure?

There is nothing wrong with trying something new. But we should never trade in common sense for a momentary good time. That is almost always a bad trade. If the activity is something you wouldn’t do on a Monday when you are stone cold sober, you shouldn’t do on a Saturday when intoxicated with the bad judgment typically displayed while on vacation. Your hand-eye coordination and reflexes are not better when on vacation.

A good vacation is a safe vacation. You will not have less fun because you drove safely, ate wisely, and skipped walking over hot coals with your bare feet.

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