Hello, Where Can I Start?

Hello everyone, my name is Alex and I want to be a programmer. Big and broad dream, I know. I'm still in high school (Sophmore) and I recently got a letter saying that one of the classes I picked would not be running next year. That class was Computer Programming. This past year I took an introduction to Java for half the year, but that was the first half of the year and not only was the class taught poorly (WE NEVER EVEN LEARNED HOW TO MAKE A "Hello World" PROGRAM!), I don't remember a thing from it. It was so long ago, I remember nothing, other than "String=words, Int=numbers, Boolean=t/f". Literally that's all I recall from 4 1/2 months of a class.

Anyway, since my school is not providing this class for me, I figure if I want to ever go to college to be a programmer, I have to learn it on my own. But I really don't know where to begin. I know Java is big due to it being cross-platform, but I've also heard that HTML is good to start out with. On the other hand, my father took either C or C++ classes when he was in school. He doesn't remember much of it or use it for his job anymore, but I'm sure if I ask him I might be able to get some old textbooks stored away somewhere. I was thinking about asking these questions to my uncle and his son (my cousin) about this, they both have college degrees for some sort of programming, and my cousin writes programs for some hospital software at the moment. However, I won't be seeing either of these guys for a while. They both live 6-8 hours away and I won't get to talk to them until Thanksgiving, and that's a big no-no. The reason for it being a bad thing is because school's out in like a week for me, and I'm going to have a ton of free time over the summer. I figured during those days when its super-hot or thunderstorms, I'd like to learn programming. But as I said before, I have no experience, and don't even know which language I should start with. This is my last resort if I want to go to college for this so I really need to crack down and try to learn something this summer. Please help me out here. :)