Went to the outer Banks with my wife, her grandmother, her brother, and his girlfriend.

First of all, I don't dislike any of them, I like them better than a lot of my own family, but we're different kinds of people. If I hadn't married my wife, they're not the sort of people I'd ever choose to interact with, I'd make polite conversation with them at a party or something, but I'd never really give them a second thought.

I'm not a beach person, I hate sand, I hate sitting around in the sun, I hate the biting flies, I like fishing but don't really enjoy surf fishing. They all of course wanted to spend a lot of time on the beach.

They have a lot of love for this island, once upon a time their family owned a vacation house there and they'd pretty much spend the whole summer there. I have no such nostalgia goggles, so as far as I'm concerned it's a pretty meh place to spend your time. It has a handful of mediocre restaurants and bars, a bunch of touristy stores selling mostly beach themed bric a brac and artsy craftsy junk that I have no real desire to buy or even wander around a store looking at, and a grocery store and liquor store with pretty limited selections. Nothing really there that appealed to me.

We mostly cooked at the house, which isn't really my idea of a vacation, I get it, it's cheaper, but I'm trying to avoid doing chores, that's kind of the point. Nonetheless, I do enjoy cooking, I planned out my meals, came up with cocktail pairings, etc. had to modify them a bit on the fly because as I was finding out my brother in law and his girlfriend are kind of picky eaters. The other parties kind of skimped a bit on their meal planning, we had some meals that were frozen store bought lasagna and such. I kind of knew my meals would be fancier and more involved than theirs but I kind of expected them to put in at least a little effort.

Her grandmother was in the early stages of dementia, not too bad at the time, but she was a little restless and forgetful, which just made her a little annoying to deal with when we just wanted to chill at the house.

I had also somewhat recently started a new job working night shift, so my whole schedule was kind of flipped upside down and most of the time I just really wanted to sleep.

Also the place was about a 9 hour drive, which baffles me because we have a lot of perfectly fine beaches with more stuff to do within an hour or two from home.

We decided to drive mostly overnight to avoid traffic meeting up at about 11 IIRC to drive down in 3 different cars, we'd get there probably by about noon accounting for bathroom breaks, grabbing breakfast on the way, etc. giving us a chance to put pack, grab lunch, maybe take a nap, then still get some time in do vacation stuff (whatever vacation stuff means on an island with literally nothing to do)

I kind of figured they would all have their cars mostly loaded and be ready to go, which was wishful thinking, we didn't actually get on the road until well after midnight, it might have even been after 1.

I really felt like I wasted my week off from work. Only real things I enjoyed was when my wife and I rented a boat with her brother and his girlfriend and just kind of boated around for a few hours, and playing boardgames at the house at night, but I didn't need to spend about 18 hours driving and spend a week there to boat around for a few hours and play boardgames.

They had talked about trying to do annual family vacations after that (they were at least going to throw me a bone and not do the beach every year, though I suspect a lot of my other gripes would've still persisted) but luckily for me the next year COVID hit, her grandmother's dementia has progressed a lot since then and her mom is taking care of her, and we've all just had general life stuff keeping us busy so that hasn't happened.