Hi. I’m Becky, and I am helping out my good friend Isabel with a post about vacationing, while she is enjoying her time in Europe. What Isabel didn’t realize in her request that I blog about vacations (which, by the way, made me incredibly, geekily excited!!!) was that I would be blogging on the other spectrum of vacationing from her and The King.* Please see Disclaimer 1 below

What I mean is this: we are the anti-vacation family.** Please see Disclaimer 2 below

Please let me explain. I didn’t catch on to the fact that my husband was vacation-cautious until years after we were married. While dating, we went camping a few times with his family. We even drove to Las Vegas for a weekend to pick up a friend who needed a ride. The future looked bright on the vacation horizon; I could see family trips with the kids, cozy nights away from home in hotels, extended trips to far-flung places as we grew older. It was all there, a surety in the future. Sure, I’d heard about the visit to England that he’d turned down when he was in junior high (a friend was going there to visit his grandma, and invited him along), but it seemed relatively reasonable. He was young. Who knew what the English Granny fixed for dinner or what her house smelled like, after all. I didn’t even bat an eye.

I should have clued in when, instead of driving to Southern California for the free condo given as a wedding gift, we opted to spend our honeymoon in Vegas. Or even when we came home early from said honeymoon. Or, when I felt a certain amount of reluctance from him when we visited Lake Powell with my sister and parents the first summer we were married. Of course, the reality of sleeping on abutting air mattresses to the in-laws was the excuse I provided then.

Here I am now, 9 ½ years, 2 kids, and 4 cats later, and these are the vacations that I can chronicle for your reading pleasure (not counting the aforementioned, of course):

1. A few 1 and 2 night camping trips with his dad, circa 1999-2002, and his mom, circa 1999-2004.

2. Trip to Vegas in 2003, in which a very close relative should have gotten married, but failed to due to the fact that the relative caught his soon-to-be bride cheating on him with another GIRL the Sunday before the wedding. Yes, you read that correctly. And yes, in case you wondered, we came home early.

3. 2-night stay in condo approximately 60 miles north of where we live back in 2005. This was for another family wedding (no sexual preference surprises this time around; phew!) We actually stayed the whole time, and also managed to do 4 loads of laundry during the first 24 hours. Special. Nothing more fun than using someone else’s washer and dryer, eh?

4. Trip to Spokane, WA in 2006 to visit some good friends who had recently moved there. We had planned to stay a week, then chiseled it down to 3 nights in Spokane and 2 nights in Lava Hot Springs. We managed the 3 nights in Spokane (had a great time! Eastern Washington is so beautiful, and I LOVED Coeur D’Alene), but managed only 1 night in Lava. Yep, we came home early. This was definitely our finest vacationing form, despite the fact that even on the Monday before we left, we were arguing about whether we would really go or not. I won.

5. The thwarted attempt at a quick trip to New York this past May. I had a hotel, and stand-by buddy passes. It’s still a little sore, this one. New York is my dream. One day I will get back there.

I now stand firmly on the shores of reality in regard to our vacationing future. I now plan things very, very carefully, and realize that what might sound fun to him in March, sounds a lot less appealing in May when the reality of the trip begins to set in. By then he has realized that I’m not going to lose interest in traveling the entire east coast in a convertible VW Rabbit, which he agreed to in a half-hearted sort of way, and that I’m going to be pretty mad when I realize he didn’t have any intention of going.

But, through all this, we’ve come to a certain understanding of one another. Maybe if I try to not set my vacationing sites so high, we can come to an agreement. Case in point: we stayed two nights in a local resort town in August that resulted in zero fights and zero coming home early experiences. We have plans to take our kids to Disneyland next year, and I am 100% sure that he:

1 – realizes it will happen and

2 – is okay with leaving the cats.

Marriage is all about compromise. It isn’t about me anymore, it’s about us, and I can work at us. I can wait for years when it will be easier to leave our young children, when we have a little more money to spend on a nicer hotel and tickets with actual seats attached to them, not just the possibility of seats. And maybe one day I will be in a position where I can do things like this with friends or family, who also need a get-a-way, and then I won’t have to worry about leaving kids OR cats, just how much fun I can have being a girl out on the town.

But in the meantime, we will remain the vacation-cautious family. Nice to meet you.

Hope Isabel is having a great time. I wonder if today is the mandatory nude day? Maybe I don’t really want to know…

*Disclaimer 1: It is almost physically impossible for me to write anything without being long-winded. I apologize for the length of this post to any who aren’t accustomed to me.

**Disclaimer 2: Written with full knowledge of said vacationing-cautious husband. He’s heard it all before from me, people.