Contemplations of a dad, husband, son-in-law & history teacher

August 12, 2014

After our RV trip seven years ago, I asked myself the question, “Would I do it again?”  The answer was, “In a heartbeat!”  Nothing has changed after this trip.  I love traveling, and I love that my kids get to see different places and meet different people.  I will admit that this trip was a little more challenging in some ways than past trips.  On the RV trip, we had our motorhome with us almost the entire time, and when we went to Europe, we had the car that we leased once we got there.  Transportation on this trip was a big variable, and I did have to stay on my toes and think ahead about making connections on buses, trains, ferries, etc. in order to get from point A to point B.  It added a little stress, I admit, but I also enjoy fitting all of the puzzle pieces together especially with all of the moving parts.  On this trip, I kept expecting something along the way to not go right – a late train, a missed ferry, the rental agency to be out of cars, something, but other than the first flight out of Denver being late off the bat, everything else worked out as well or better than I could have expected. 

This trip was very special mostly because of all the connections to Grandma Kit.  I have already mentioned some things like even the Disney part was a fulfillment of her last Christmas present to the kids, and the Isle of Palms in South Carolina is where she and her husband Bob used to take their family.  Of course, the DC part of the trip centered on her interment, and Nantucket is where she grew up.  We were able to meet several of her nieces and nephews that some of us hadn’t met and others of us had not seen in more than twenty years. 

Becky also pointed out something that I hadn’t even thought about when making the plans.  I decided to drive to Denver and fly out of there simply because it is a major airline hub, and we were able to get much cheaper fares starting there than we could have in California.  It also gave us the opportunity to visit friends and family in Utah and Colorado.  I had totally forgotten until Becky pointed it out that even though her family lived in Virginia at the time, her dad had been on a work trip in Denver when he passed away.  So when we took Kit’s ashes to Denver and then flew from there, in a way she was starting her trip to Arlington at the same place where her husband Bob had thirty years earlier. 

The final thing that I have loved about these trips as well as other family vacations is how close they have made our family.  We have two teenagers who truly still enjoy spending time with their family.  I can remember when our kids were little and we went to a beach house one summer.  One of the nights at the beach house, I planned a skit night where we did things like lip-syncing with dance moves and costumes to Weird Al’s Amish Paradise.  My sister-in-law Dee mocked the idea, but a year or two later when she saw how much the kids loved it, she was totally on board with nutty ideas like that.  That’s how I feel about our crazy trips.  They seem over-the-top at first, but I believe that things like this have really brought our family closer. 

Of course, as a teacher I have the time but not always the means to pull off trips like this on a regular basis.  As travel is one of the things I really love, I truly have been blessed to find ways to see other places and visit loved ones as economically as possible, and I will continue to look for these opportunities. My next thought for a random trip is maybe three or four years from now getting a group of people together and renting a castle in Scotland for a week before heading over to visit friends in Switzerland and France. Who’s in?