Family Vacation

As I am sitting gazing out at the frozen landscape that is my backyard, I'm dreaming about a day when the weather is hot, the grass is green, and my children can play outside without five layers on. Thinking about the summer automatically takes my mind to summer vacations. Growing up summer vacations were a mainstay in my family. Every year we would pack up the car, Griswald style, and go somewhere. It really didn't matter what the destination was, just as long as we were going there as a family.

Our vacations are some of my favorite memories. The smell of camp fire and pine trees still makes me nostalgic for my family sitting around a campfire, listening to loons in the Boundary Waters and licorice always will make me think of long car trips with family size bags of Twizzlers. Not to say that all of the trip were beautiful and serene Norman Rockwell style vacations. Oh believe me there were some doozies. One year my family went camping in, I swear, 150 degree heat with 100% humidity. During that vacation, while we were basically melting in the heat, we were also lucky enough to experience a black fly hatch. I truly believe black flies were spawned from the devil! That specific trip is fondly called the "camping trip from hell". Even though living through the trip was painful, whenever I conger up the image of my brother running down the shores of Lake Superior with a cloud of black flies following him cartoon style I can't help but laugh and I bet every member of my family would be laughing beside me. (Even my brother would laugh, although it did take him a little bit to get over all of the fly bites!)

The point of my walk down memory lane is that I want the same thing for my children. R and I decided this is the year to start the infamous family vacation, so this morning the kids and I surfed the web looking for the perfect cabin in northern Wisconsin. Yes, the trip from hell has made me a cabin girl, no more tents for me!

Ideally, this trip will be the first of many for my family. I'm predicting some good trips and some bad. I'm crossing my fingers that the good will out weigh the bad and that lots of memories will be made. Hopefully when my kiddos are grown and are looking back at all of our family vacations they will think to themselves, "I want that for my kids." I don't know if my parents had any intentions of inspiring family vacations in me as an adult, but I definitely want what I was lucky enough to have for my three.