Summer vacation
1The wife is the one that goes on summer vacations. So far she has gone to (partial list) Chicago, Atlanta, Lousiana, Yellowstone, Carlsbad Caverns, Mount Rushmore, etc.
She goes with the kids and drags me along.
She is attempting to plan summer vacation this year and I will be dragged along behind as usual.
Telling her that we probably shouldn’t plan that far in advance and that we don’t know anything about the post covid world does no good (because we won’t be going anywhere if covid is still going on).
Anyway… At some point I lost my train of thought on this whine. Because that is what this is. Maybe later I will pick this back up. Maybe not.
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Booked mine last year. Who knows - could be a perfect release from
captivityquarantinepartyvacation at the beach.I often get taken along on vacation. I’ve been dropping hints that it would be a great summer to visit roadside attractions. World’s Largest Ball of Twine and whatnot. So far no one here thinks it’s a good idea.
@Nate311 we road tripped to Iowa and back through STL a few years back, staying in STL on my wife’s birthday coinciding with the riots in Ferguson. I kept saying that we were just going to point the car in the general direction and go, and if we saw something interesting like the world’s biggest ball of twine we would stop and look at it. Because that’s how a real road trip should work.
We did stop and look at roadside attractions a lot. The American Gothic house. The world’s largest rocking chair. And more. So my wife detours us through Branson on the way home. She guides me to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum, where we come face to face with the world’s biggest ball of string.
It ain’t twine, but it was close, and pretty damn cool of her.
@djslack nice.
@djslack @Nate311 Shoulda made down to Metropolis, IL and see Superman. Or Jesse James hideout (near Meramec Caverns?).
Although I haven’t gone on a vacation since 2008 just 3 weeks before I moved 2500 miles it was great to be dragged along. My friend and I brought our respective kids. We agreed on Yellowstone. I told her we can do whatever she wants there. She planned it. All I had to do was drive, do dishes, and pay our share. She had everything else worked out. It was fantastic!
Of course I had, pre kid, gone on many vacations by myself in a number of different parts of the world. A lot of what I did wasn’t planned in advance per say. I mean I had information about what was interesting but often planned what I was doing that day, often taking advantage of joining people I met along the way with what they were doing. Hmm raining in Den Haag. Ok will catch the train (using my train pass) to go 3 hours east, check out something interesting there and leave when it starts raining there (did that once in Holland and the dutch though I was nuts). I probably missed a few things that I should have seen doing that, but I had a lot of fun and still saw a lot doing it the way I did it.
@Kidsandliz yeah, those are some of the best trips, no plan, no itinerary, no expectations.
One summer my son and a friend bought Eurorail passess and would go to the local train station, look at the board and then decide where to go based on the next departure… “hey let’s go to Seville, the train leaves in 30 minutes. If we go to Amsterdam we have to wait for 90…”
@chienfou @Kidsandliz Yup. Made some good friends and better stories. How can you be disappointed you didn’t see something you’ve never seen anyway, right?
Went to Vienna, Austria (where they have no kangaroos, btw). Visited Mostar and Medjugore. Spent a night in Paris with a rooftop balcony view of the Eiffel Tower. Explored the Atomium in Brussels, saw where Napoleon met his Waterloo and the invention of Beef Wellington. Pub crawled in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day. Best trips ever.
@chienfou I did a lot of that too. I did have some limits as I was working while in those countries so only had weekends or the time I put aside before I came back home to check things out so, for example, when I worked in Germany I only saw the part of Austria that was around 5 miles away (Salzburg) and then only some of the province I was working in due to time constraints. I missed the rest of Germany but saw a lot of cool things in the part I did visit.
@mike808 The only thing I regret not doing was going to the Berlin wall with a bunch of other staff. I had wanted to go to Rothenburg because of all the christmas ornaments that I had been planning to buy for the family for their christmas presents and was running out of time to do both. Of course then the wall came down so I never saw that. Never got back to see Berlin either. I had some really cool adventures. As I’d hitchhike from the train to the youth hostel I’d sometimes get picked up by people who’d take me to their house for the night, show me around the next day… In one case one of the kids from one of those families came to the USA and I returned the favor taking that kid on a two week camping trip along the coast. All by chance. Really cool.
I got to hike (while working for outward bound) along the old Roman road in NW England (Lake District). That was amazingly cool to know I was walking on something people walked on 2000 years ago. We just don’t have that kind of history all over the USA like you can find in other countries. In Cambodia it was just incredible to see Angkor Wat. While in this country we have some Native American ruins that are old, the way ancient history is all over Europe, Asia, etc. and people just take it for granted, is amazing to me.
Plan a local vacation, not staycation. Get a hotel in the nearest city, see the sights there, eat out.
@callow
That won’t do for the wife. She’s planning on the east coast… Long drive.
@jst1ofknd We’ve had many nice vacations on Emerald Isle, NC. There’s some cool stuff to do if you’re feeling it, but mostly we just play on the beach.
@Nate311
That’s about what she has planned I think. I heard someone about Cape Hatteras or something that I think is in NC.
We just had to pay the tab on a non-refundable hotel reservation last week. It was supposed to be our spring break vacation, booked several months earlier.
So, we lost about $800 and didn’t get to go on our trip. All of the attractions are closed, we don’t want to be travelling and touching strange surfaces unnecessarily, and we needed to work since we’re using up our leave taking turns staying home with the kids.
I’m not trying to complain, but you might mention that to her as she’s doing he planning. We’re not going to do any serious vacation planning again any time soon.
@Limewater That is seriously sad and such a major financial hit. I know at least the airline industry is giving ticket vouchers good for 2 years to anyone caught in this - from what I have read it was the big airlines doing it with the expectation that others would follow along. With luck the place you were staying might let you defer. No harm in asking.