Vacation Planning

Staying in a condo feels like playing house. We still have to do things like cook and do dishes, but they’re different dishes and there aren’t that many of them. As with playing house, there are some inconveniences. We don’t have the cooking tools we’re accustomed to and there is always some item which we’ve forgotten at home or lost somewhere in transit. Yet somehow staying in a condo feels vacationy while doing the same things at home does not.

I’m pleased that we’ve arrived at a stage where vacation trips can actually be relaxing instead of differently stressful. Babies and toddlers are very expressive when their routines are disrupted and that usually manifests as meltdowns any time of day or as wakefulness when everyone else wants to be sleeping. Being away from home means that parents have left behind some of their usual coping strategies for managing their kids. I suppose that some young kids are easy travelers. Mine loved taking trips and going new places, but when we did I had to increase my level of parental oversight. New places meant new ideas in young heads and not all of those new ideas were safe. Heads full of new ideas did not go to sleep easily. New surroundings also meant that sibling frictions busted out in aggravating ways and required mediation. During most of my years of parenting “vacation” meant being short on sleep and exhausted from extra supervision. It also meant visiting with loved ones, interesting new experiences, and growing knowledge for my kids. (As an example: Why I Love Jellyfish.) The trips we took were worth it, but they were in no way relaxing.

Things are different now. Some of this is the result of my kids getting older, but much of it is us finally learning how to structure our vacations in ways that work for our family. Then we repeated that structure often enough that we all know what to expect. Instead of vacation being a disruption to all of our patterns, we just fall into our vacation patterns instead of our at home patterns. I suspect the same could be accomplished for younger children, but there is the added difficulty that babies and toddlers hit developmental milestones so very quickly. Trips taken six months apart will be different experiences because the child has changed so much.

We take our family trips to places we can reach by driving in five hours or less. At some point we may venture into family travel by air, but it is cost prohibitive for six people. Also, airports are inherently stressful. For us traveling to go stay with other people at their house is stressful, even when we love the people. Staying in a hotel room is similarly stressful because we’re all on top of each other constantly. Renting a condo or staying at a cabin has made it possible for vacation to be relaxing. So we pick a condo where we can go do interesting things for half or all of the days and where we can come back and relax in the evenings. I’ve learned that bringing along some of our usual things like mobile devices means that we are able to play familiar games along with new ones.

Someday we’ll be more adventuresome. We’ll pick a vacation trip that is less focused on optimizing relaxation and more focused on going new places and stretching ourselves. But right now what we need from our vacations is being together outside our regular round of things. Playing house in a condo accomplishes that nicely.