Some vacations seem determined to ignore every carefully made plan. Oddly enough, that may not be entirely bad news.

Nobody sets off on vacation hoping to create a family legend. You imagine sunsets, beautiful meals, and perhaps one photograph in which everybody is simultaneously looking at the camera -- or actually, everyone is in the picture.

What you don't imagine is Dad reversing the rental car into a bollard before you've left the airport, a child being sick over the only clean towel, or discovering at 11 p.m. that the charming vacation rental you've booked appears to have been photographed during an entirely different period of its existence, or even location!

Yet these are very often the vacations we remember. Ask a family about the beautiful hotel they stayed in 12 years ago and you may be met with blank faces. Ask about the night the tent collapsed during a thunderstorm and suddenly everyone has a contribution. One person remembers it landing on their side, somebody else remembers Dad standing outside in his underwear, and Dad will almost certainly insist that neither of these things happened. And just like that, a perfectly miserable night has become family folklore.

Of course, this transformation isn't immediate. Nobody standing beside a broken-down car in 95-degree heat with three fractious children thinks, One day we'll laugh about this. At that particular moment, you're mainly wondering whether it's possible to divorce somebody because they insisted on taking "the scenic route."

But time does peculiar things to inconvenience. It removes the sweat, panic, and murderous thoughts and leaves behind the funny bits. The ferry you missed becomes The Ferry Incident. The vacation home with the inexplicable smell becomes That Stinky House. The restaurant where your toddler overturned an entire pitcher of beer onto a neighboring table develops such legendary status that the now-grown toddler has heard the story approximately 700 times. Even arguments can become strangely funny once nobody remembers what they were actually about.

Perhaps that's because flawless days don't always give us much of a story. You went to the beach, the weather was lovely, everyone behaved beautifully, and you came home. Wonderful day; terrible anecdote. Compare that with the afternoon you trekked half a mile carrying towels, umbrellas, inflatables, snacks and two small children, only to discover you'd arrived at a nudist beach.

Or as my brother did a few years back, schlepping an unusually heavy deck chair nearly a mile down the beach only to discover it was a folding clothes rack -- he's never lived that one down. Now you have something to talk about.

Family memories aren't curated photo albums. They're a jumble of glorious moments, catastrophes, private jokes, repeated stories and details that become funnier every time they're told. Somewhere along the way, the facts also become negotiable. Dad was lost for 20 minutes the first time the story was told. By Christmas, it was two hours. Ten years later, he had apparently driven halfway across Portugal while refusing to admit he might have taken a wrong turn. Dad will dispute this version until his dying day, and nobody will believe him.

There's something lovely underneath all this silliness. When we remember family vacations, we're rarely remembering scenery alone; we're remembering each other. We remember who stayed calm when everything went wrong, who made everybody laugh, who sulked spectacularly, who produced emergency cookies from a handbag at precisely the right moment (that would be me!), and who was absolutely certain they'd packed the passports and, regrettably, hadn't.

The disaster becomes precious because the people inside the story are precious. We spend so much energy trying to make things perfect for the people we love — especially on vacation, when considerable money, planning and expectation may be involved — that when something goes wrong it can feel as though we've somehow failed.

But family life was never going to be made up of perfect days. It's thousands of shared experiences, including the ones where somebody cried, the heavens opened, the restaurant was dreadful and the carefully planned itinerary was abandoned before lunch.

There's room for all of that messiness in faith, too. Christianity doesn't promise you a beautifully choreographed life in which plans unfold precisely as expected. Much of loving other people happens in the interruption, the inconvenience and the moment when the day we'd planned disappears and we have to work out what to do instead. On some family vacations, maintaining Christian charity towards the person who insisted they didn't need a map may be quite enough spiritual growth for one afternoon.

So if this summer's vacation didn't quite resemble the one you'd imagined, keep the evidence. Keep the photograph where everyone's hair is plastered to their heads by rain, the one where Dad looks furious beside the broken car, and the blurry picture from the restaurant that served the worst spaghetti known to man.

One day, somebody will pull one out at Christmas and the whole thing will begin again. The children will argue about what really happened, Dad will insist that he was not lost, and someone will add a detail that definitely wasn't part of the story five years ago.

With any luck, The Ferry Incident will last for generations.