Hi, I’m Kim. I usually hang out over here. I’ve been blogging for a little over a year. I’m honored that Isabel asked me to blogsit while she and King and Babboo are gallivanting around Europe. Lucky family. She suggested I write about vacations, since she’s on a vacation and it seemed like a pretty good theme, considering. She’s pretty smart that way.

I just got back from vacation in Antigua, and pretty much already blogged about the highlights (TSA encounters, surprise engagements, that kind of stuff).

I started thinking about vacations I planned but never took. And how I wish I would have.

Last year at this time my marriage was done. He was moving out and it was just going to be me and my girls. I was trying to think of something fun that we could do, just us girls, for a long weekend in September, as kind of a distraction. We all loved the beach but that was a long drive from the Midwest. We couldn’t afford to fly all four of us. And lodging - forget it.

Then I remembered a friend telling me about the Indiana Dunes. It’s in Northern Indiana on the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and it looks like a beach. After all, the Great Lakes are inland seas, you know. You can rent a cabin and enjoy the water and sand, just like an ocean beach, but for half the price and half the drive. Brilliant, I thought. So I printed out a few houses and some websites. I took it home and left it in my car. Things happened and we didn’t get a chance to go before it got too cold. “Next summer,” I thought.

The girls and I talked about trying to fly to San Diego to see my brother before he left for Iraq. Again, things happened and we couldn’t do it. “Next year, when he comes home,” I thought.

We talked about going to my dad’s at the Lake of the Ozarks, three hours away. Or even having Jessica take Kelli down for a weekend. We never did, because of work or school schedules. “Next month, we’ll go.”

Well, it’s almost next year now, and I didn’t go to the Indiana Dune. I didn’t fly to San Diego. I have been better about going to see my dad.

I know “seize the day” is easier said than done. But sometimes, you’ve got to grab a toothbrush, clean underwear and hit the road. Because you might not get a next week, next month, next year.

Would the fact that we went to Indiana or San Diego change things and they’d still be alive today?

No.

But it would have been one more set of memories that I would have to think about when I look at their pictures and remember what could have been.

So grab the ones you love and take a vacation. Even if it’s renting a hotel room and using the pool. Pack junk food. Jump on the beds. The memories you gain are worth more than the money you spend.

Hi there. It’s May, Isabel’s friend who ditched her to move to Reno (of all places). Isabel asked me to talk about vacations. And while I haven’t been on any fabulous exotic adventures lately, I am a get-out-of-town kind of girl. I love having a special little something in the future to think about when life gets monotonous. We’ve gone out of town a lot this year. We went to my sister’s wedding in February, where we got all the grandkids together & shot this awesome pic… (Note Lil’ May’s surly expression & cousin’s “YOU WILL DIE NOW” hate glare.)

We visited Seattle to see our BFFs & wonder, “Why did we move to Reno?”

(Also, as previously mentioned, Isabel & I suck for not taking more pictures of US together. Our friendship has been commemorated with some crappy photos of me pregnant & moving, and some random shots from baby showers…)

(Seattle Aquarium with Lil May’s BFF)

And then BACK to California for my Dad’s wedding. (That dapper gentleman is my Grandpa, surrounded by grandkids doing the group-picture-get-in-close-hug.)

And I can’t help myself & have dragged the girls up to Lake Tahoe EVERY WEEK this summer (so that living in Reno can seem cooler, and I can say, “And Lake Tahoe is SO CLOSE, we go every week!”

But look at the beautiful scenery, can you blame me???

So since I’m driving my 3.5 year old & 7 month old down to drama central (also known as “home”) in SoCal in 2 weeks, and I need your help. How can I keep them happy in the car for 10 – 11 hours BESIDES portable DVD players, wrapped dollar store gifts, lifetime supply of Pringles, and Raffi CD’s. And also, why do I forget about the living hell that is traveling with small children every single time I plan a trip? Do you think Bella has this problem with Renesmee?

PS – Was I too subtle about the Reno thing? Sorry if you love Reno. Maybe we can meet up for Awful Awful burgers & you can tell me why it doesn’t suck, I mean what I’ve overlooked…

I’m Janssen - I blog over at Everyday Reading about books, supposedly, but more often about how partial feeds make me crazy and how I’m totally Team Jacob, except when I’m Team Edward (I suppose that last bit is technically about books, but I’d be more likely to categorize it under “mouth-frothing obsession” than “reading” ).

I also occasionally write about the trips my husband Bart and I take because we currently don’t have any kids (or money, actually, since we’re both in grad school). When I think of the trips we’ve taken since we got married, I always think about the one that made me first feel like a real grown-up.

Four months after we got married, we realized Bart had a free plane ticket that we needed to use, so on a whim, we decided to go to Chicago to visit his aunt and uncle whom he’d lived with for a few months during an internship. After all, who wouldn’t want to go to Chicago in the middle of December?

We had grand plans for the trip - the site seeing, the museums, the culture, the grown-upness, etc.

The first day we were there, we got up, dressed in about eighteen layers (Chicago is cold!) and took the train into the city. We walked up and down Michigan Avenue, going into the American Doll store (squee! Am I the only one who spent approximately a year of my life memorizing the catalog?), and checking out my first Apple Store. It was an amazing, fun, freezing day.

The next day, we had planned to go to the Art Institute. And then, when our alarm clocks went off the next morning, we realized “hey, we don’t really want to go. We feel like we should, but frankly, we’d rather stay in this king size bed and enjoy the fact that finals are over and that we’re on vacation. Also, is it even legal to set an alarm while on vacation?”

This was a total breakthrough for us. We’d always been the kids on vacation, the ones without much of a say in what we’d do or see (also, both of us have parents who are really into museums). Now? We could say “we’d rather spend this vacation sleeping in, staying up late playing cards, and seeing exactly zero works of art.”

And that’s what we did.

It’s been almost three years since that trip, and it’s still one of the best weeks of my life.

(P.S. We went on a cruise a while after that and watched the entire first season of 24 while on the ship. People kept saying how crazy it was to do that while we were sailing into Jamaica and Grand Cayman and Mexico, but it was the ultimate “this is our vacation and we’ll spend it however is pleasant to us” moment. And I’d do it again in a heartbeat.)

To some of you, I may just be the “Party Shuttle Sign Girl” from BlogHer. Really though, my name is Stephanie; I have a real job, real friends, a family, and I’m also a blogger. (Hey - if you were offered $100 to do it, you’d do it too, OK?)

To say that I was a little bit honored when Isabel asked me to be a guest blogger is a bit of an understatement. I’ll spare you gooey details, but it’s true. When she asked me to blog specifically about vacationing, I had to laugh because I’ve become known as a sort of “Vacation Queen” amongst my friends. So far this year I’ve been on the road for 53 days. That’s roughly 20% of the time, people. And those were not days that I traveled for work. So yes, I think I’m qualified to tell you a little bit about vacationing, or as I like to call it, “making the most of my weekends.”

A few years ago I had a boyfriend who I will call Harold for the sake of this post. He was going to professional school and a few weeks before his first year of school ended, he told me he was going to Mexico for the last two weeks of his break. The first few days of it were actually spent in Alaska with me, so I didn’t have much to complain about. But, I was in love and knew that two weeks without him was going to be torturous. The morning I dropped him off at the airport on his way to Mazatlan, I said “What would you do if I came down to visit over the long weekend coming up?” He just stared at me and said “Well, if you want to come, that would be fine, but tickets are expensive, I’m sure.” I quickly replied that tickets were only about $400 and even if the prices went up by the time I bought it, I was sure that I could get a cheap ticket to Cabo and he could take a ferry over to spend the weekend there. (You think I did a little research before bringing up the idea????) I just told him to check his email within the next week and I’d email him my flight information.

By the time I got online to buy my ticket, the price of plane tickets to Mazatlan was $900. I quickly checked on tickets to Cabo San Lucas and found that they were much cheaper. I checked into the ferry from Mazatlan from Cabo, saw that they had a scheduled departure the night before I arrived, so I booked the flight and sent the information to Harold. The night before I was to leave for Cabo, I was at dinner at a noisy restaurant. After leaving, I looked at my phone to realize that I had 20 missed calls. I hurried home and my roommate told me that Harold had even called her to try and reach me. Supposedly the ferry from Mazatlan to Cabo didn’t exist any longer - he had taken a bus a few hours north to catch the ferry from there, but the tickets were sold out for that evening. Great. Just great. Keep in mind that buying my ticket to Cabo was the last thing I had done in preparation for the trip - no hotel reservations, no car rental, no NOTHING. The next morning, my roommate was supposed to drive me to the airport, so she came in my room and asked me what I was going to do. I just told her that I was going to go and hope that everything worked out like I had planned. I bought the ticket (and a new bathing suit!) and with or without Harold, I was going to enjoy a long weekend in Mexico.

Right after I walked through security at the airport, my phone rang and I saw that it was an unavailable number. I quickly answered “Harold!??” His voice on the other line wasn’t very reassuring when all he said was “Where are you??” I replied that I was in the airport on my way to Cabo and he said “Oh good” with a sigh of relief. I asked him where he was and all he told me was that he didn’t have much money left on his phone card from all his failed attempts at getting a hold of me the night before and that I should meet him at the bus station in San Jose del Cabo when I left the airport. I tried to ask him how he got there and all he said was “Well, I’ll never think of avocados the same way again. See you in a few hours.”

Thanks to Harold’s phone call, I wasn’t quite as anxious on the flight as I could have been. The lady next to me was very chatty, though all I wanted to do was sleep. A few minutes before landing, she asked me where I was going in Cabo. I told her that I was meeting my boyfriend at the bus station and she offered me a ride. I quickly said “Oh, no, thanks” and then a few minutes went by. I started realizing how bad my Spanish really is and then of course started panicking about how I was going to get to the bus station, etc. I asked her if I could actually get a ride and she was more than happy to help me out. Before I knew it, I was in a stranger’s rental car in the middle of Baja. When we pulled up to the bus station, I hopped out of the car and ran inside the bus station convenience store to find Harold buying a candy bar. I told him about the lady I met on the plane and that she was willing to drive us into Cabo San Lucas. He got in the car and started telling us the story of how he’d basically given some truck drivers $200 so that they would put him as a stowaway on the ferry in the back of their avocado truck for over 15 hours while he had a knarly sunburn. (I’m thinking that his side of the story deserves a whole other blog post.) Needless to say, he got there to the station around the same time that my flight landed. Airplane Lady asked if it was OK if she just took us to her hotel since it was within walking distance to downtown Cabo. Of course we were just grateful for the free ride and nice company she was providing. Upon arrival to her hotel, she told us that we just HAD to come in and see her room since it was so nice and we could go for a swim there since there were 3 pools right outside her door. We weren’t dumb enough to turn down her offer and she seemed legit. About five minutes later, we were in her hotel room checking out the nice view and she told us that if we wanted to just stay with her for a few days, we were welcome to. Harold and I talked it over and 10 seconds later, it was agreed that we would stay. In the mornings, we would lay out by the pool and then in the afternoons, we’d go downtown and go shopping and see the sites. At night, we would go out to the beach and watch shooting stars. I don’t think there is anything more romantic than laying on the beach at night watching shooting stars. The morning that my flight left we hiked over to Lands End and saw the famous arch out in the water. It was early enough that we were the only ones there. …sigh.

We sent our gracious new friend a dozen roses after returning home - she wouldn’t accept any money. Did I mention that the trip was romantic? These days, I just can’t get over the fact that I somehow ended up staying in an awesome hotel with a super nice stranger in Mexico for free-fifty-free. Forget that it was romantic. Forget that my boyfriend rode in the back of an avocado truck with a sunburn for 15 hours as a stowaway just to spend the weekend with me. In fact, let’s just forget that it was probably the most reckless thing I’ve done in pretty much my entire life - fly to a foreign country with zero plans. So now you tell me: what’s the most reckless thing you’ve done on a vacation? Keep it clean, people; keep it clean.

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.