The History of My Travels

I started a post on my San Diego trip yesterday and it just never happened. I realized that a peek into my traveling past will illuminate my thoughts on vacations.

Growing up my family did not travel. There was one trip to the beach. We would go to visit grandparents and aunts and uncles in neighboring states. Our main type of travel was to every horse camp within a 50 mile radius of where we lived. Many of them multiple times. I did not get on an airplane until I was 21. I have not left the country except three times, all three just squeaking into Canada for part of a day.

To this day, I do not like horses and I only tolerate camping. So I was always in awe of people that traveled. I vowed to travel when I grew up.

Before we left for this recent trip, Ducky and I were debating when our last vacation trip was. I define travel in three categories, vacation, visiting and camping.

Visiting is when you travel somewhere to visit someone. You are seeing relatives or friends. You generally stay at their house. You feel indebted to them and therefore tread carefully while there. You operate on their schedule and feel like you have a chaperone. I realize that not all house guests feel this way. Sometimes people treat your house as their own hotel and that works for some hosts. But I am not one of those people in either category. So while visiting is fun and rewarding in its own way, it doesn't have the same feel as a vacation. Visiting has allowed me to see Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Michigan and LA. All of those visits had great memories. But they also had significant constraints.

A vacation is where you travel somewhere far enough away that you don't still feel like you are in your backyard. There are no visits planned other than maybe meeting someone for a meal. You are free to chose the activities and places that you want to experience. You don't always feel like you need to be on your best behavior. You can take a nap in the middle of the afternoon and not worry about anyone else's schedule. I have now had three vacations in my life. The first, my honeymoon in 1993. We went up to the Puget Sound area and Victoria, B.C. It was the ultimate vacation on a budget. We had no money and didn't realize that wasn't going to change for a very long time. Our second was in college two years later, 1995, to San Francisco. We mistakenly assumed that once we got out of college we would have enough money to do some real traveling. But that we should take advantage of the fact that now we had time. So we charged ourselves a vacation. It was fun, we decided each day what we wanted to do and then off we went.

Thirteen years later, we finally go on vacation again. All that money we thought we would have after graduation? Spent on grad school and student loans. We have two mortgages, one for our home and one for our educations. So here I am all these years later still in awe of people that get to travel, watching my friends take yearly vacations. But we are working on finding ways to travel more, remodel the house, pay off student loans and save for retirement.

The last category is camping. It is too much work and I don't like to be dirty. So we have camping equipment, but we haven't really used it since sweetP was one. We took him camping. He loved it, but it took us two months to get him sleeping through the night again.

Tomorrow I will begin to share the grand adventure that was San Diego.