The Great Outdoors

Even though I lived out in the country and there was always something to do, I always enjoyed watching movies. One of my all time favorite movies is called The Great Outdoors. A little ironic isn’t it? If you’ve never seen this movie, I highly recommend it. This movie is incorporates the great outdoors with a very strange, but hilarious, vacation.

This movie is about Chet Ripley, a Chicago father played by John Candy, who decides to take his family to a secluded cabin for a nice quiet vacation. What he doesn’t plan on is crazy brother-in-law Roman Craig, played by Dan Aykroyd, dropping in with his strange family. The family vacation takes a wild turn, and nothing turns out the way Chet planned.

Chet envisioned taking his sons fishing, feeding the bears, having relaxing meals with the family, and playing card games. Unfortunately Roman had other plans. Roman wanted to out do Chet by doing more exciting and expensive things. The whole family, except Chet, enjoyed all of Roman’s crazy activities, and Chet always ended up getting hurt in some way.

One of the reason’s I enjoy this movie so much is because it reminds me of a lot of my family vacations. I’m not saying I have a crazy uncle that crashes our vacations but it always seems our family vacations never went as planned. For some reason there was always at least one person that would get sick while we were on vacation, or the day we planned to go to the beach, it would storm.

I’m sure if you’ve ever been on a family vacation, then you know what I’m talking about. In my own experiences though, the vacations that didn’t go as planned were the most memorable, and they ended up being the best. One vacation we went on we stayed in an awful resort on a lake. We thought the resort would be really nice and it was in a very good location. However, when we arrived we were all shocked. It wasn’t like anything we’d ever seen before. It was an ugly green color with white stripes and a maroon door. This inside looked like nothing had been changed since the 70’s. The trash in the dumpster was over flowing. It seemed like the resort was almost abandoned.

Unfortunately we had already made a deposit, so there was really no way of getting out of it. We just had to tough it out. When we woke up the first morning we saw a few different animals going through the trash making a mess. Then at night there were bats outside. This resort wasn’t the most welcoming place I’ve ever stayed, but because we didn’t have a great place to stay we spent as much time on the water as we could. That vacation is one of my favorites because it brought us all closer together, and now when we look back, we can all laugh and joke about it.

If you’ve had an experience similar to this, I encourage you to watch The Great Outdoors. I’m sure you’ll find yourself cracking up. I mean after all, who doesn’t find Dan Aykroyd and John Candy hilarious.