Vacation!

Ah, vacation. One of my favorite things in the whole world. It's a time to do what I want to do. We can plan a trip or do nothing - it doesn't matter. Just the fact that you don't have to go to work makes everything so much better. My vacations were not always so, however.

When I was growing up, we had too many kids and not enough money, so real vacations were few and far between. One of the few "big" vacations we went on was when I was 16. We drove to the Grand Canyon (straight shot people, no stopping to spend the night). Seven kids and two parents in one vehicle for about 20 hours straight is very interesting.

We were "going to the Grand Canyon," but we actually only went there two days out of the five or six we were there. The rest of our extremely anally planned-out time was spent traipsing between just about every state park in Arizona. We actually made friends with a class of college students. They were on a class trip, either for Geology or Anthropology, I forget which. The point is that for two or three days, we were at every single park they were at, and vice versa. It got to the point where we recognized each other and discussed the trail we'd been on. We even stopped at one roadside park/large chunk of rock that they passed up, and they honked and waved as they drove by. Sad, I know.

Of course, this whole ordeal is on video. At that time, video cameras were still the size of a small boulder, and of course weighed as much. And who got stuck with the video camera? Me, who else? I don't think I'm actually in any of the video, but I'm sure you can hear my sighs of utter exhaustion from lugging the thing around, making the video I affectionately refer to as "The 'Hoop Dreams' of Vacations." During this time, my younger siblings were (approximately) ages 2, 3 1/2, 5, 7, 8, and 11. With that many little kids, you can imagine the soundtrack to this video: "I have to pee." I think that phrase was breathed at least every 18.5 seconds during the entire trip. At first it was funny, but the novelty quickly wore off and became the most dreaded phrase in the known universe. Because we all know that when you're traipsing down a "nature trail" that's 2 miles long, there are no bathrooms at the half-mile markers. I'll leave the solution to that problem up to your imagination.

So, from that time forward, I have vowed that my vacations would actually be vacations, and that there would be no activities that I didn't want to do. Therefore, Husband and I have not had the most amazing of vacations, but they've all been exactly what we wanted to do. One of the best vacations we ever had was an entire week that we spent at home, and just didn't tell anyone we were still in town. So, this vacation will be nothing spectacular, but it will be fun and relaxing because we will be doing exactly what we want to do...something or nothing.