In less than 12 hours, I will be airborne somewhere between Des Moines and Washington, DC. This will mark the long-awaited second vacation for my wife and me. We were married in October of 2007, and went on the most phenomenally perfect honeymoon I could possibly imagine, and haven’t been on a long vacation together since.
That’s not to say that we’ve been sitting around home for the last 18 months, just that no trip has been the same kind of trip as the honeymoon. We can usually manage about a week of vacation time per year for a trip, with the rest scavenged for use around the holidays and long weekends at home. In 2007, that weeklong trip was the honeymoon, to San Francisco and the Sonoma Valley. I could certainly write an entire post about that trip, and maybe I will eventually, but not today.
Last year we did take a trip, but it wasn’t really the same kind as the honeymoon. My family had been trying for years to get me to come along to their frequent trips to the Wisconsin Dells, and we finally had a week free, so that’s what we did. Again, this was an incredible trip, though very different. It was almost like a family reunion; it had been so long since I’d had a week with my family outside of Christmastime. We spent the better part of the week relaxing at the resort, spending the days running around the water park, and the evenings enjoying each others’ company in our suite. Like the honeymoon, there’s a lot more to tell about this trip, too, but another time.
And in between, we had our camping trips. Camping is one thing that my wife and I were lucky enough to discover that we both loved, and we try to spend virtually any free weekend during the summer in our tent, just the two of us and the thousands of mosquitoes. However, in all our time together, from our dating years, through our engagement and those 18 months of marriage, the only long-distance traveling trip we’ve had alone has been the honeymoon.
Of course, with such fond memories of our California trip, we knew we wanted to do something similar again, and soon. So the planning process began. And this is not so insignificant a step as one might think. When I go on a trip, I plan it out, every last detail, with thorough research and multiple itineraries before I’m finally satisfied. I realize a lot of people travel in a much more laissez-faire style – in fact, I’d wager that most people do. Pick a spot on a map, book flights and figure it out once you get there. But that’s not the way I operate. And though I’m sure the spontaneous trips work out well from time to time, I can’t imagine leaving that much to chance.
I have always been a very list-oriented, planning and plotting type of person. When other kids would hop on Santa’s lap and blurt out toys that sprang to mind, I was prepared with a list of items I wanted, ordered from most desired to least, based on a number of reconnaissance trips to the toy store to chart out my ideas. I don’t know what makes a person a planner versus a doer, so I can’t say if it’s my genes or the way I was raised (of course none of my siblings have this “sickness” like I do, so who knows?). But a lot of my vacation planning style can be attributed to my Mom.
We were able to take some pretty great camping trips when I was younger, only some of which I can remember. My Mom’s philosophy is that every state has something interesting to offer, and one needn’t only visit the tourist destinations to have a good time. The example of this that I remember the best was our trip to Nebraska. Stereotypically, there isn’t much that’s great about Nebraska. But it was the chosen state that year, so we were going to explore it and have a good time. My Mom called the state tourism office to request the visitor’s guide, and visited the library to get some guidebooks.
From there, the fun really began. I remember sitting around the dinner table, as we were winding down our meal, and my Mom would pull out the books of information on Nebraska. “Ash Fall Fossil Bed,” she might say, and proceed to read out the description for us. We’d all get to think about it, decide amongst ourselves that a volcanic fossil site with dozens of prehistoric bison, rhinos and horses sounds pretty great, and agree to put it on the list. Over the course of many weeks and months, the itinerary would come together, and we’d be all set to go.
Invariably there might be one small detail or another that wasn’t quite what we’d hoped it would be, but overall, planning the hell out of the trip worked pretty well. In fact, having a plan allowed you to change to a backup destination if one turned out to be disappointing. And would we have ended up at a Sod House in the middle of the prairie, or the unearthly Toadstool Park, had we decided to just go and figure it out as we went? I doubt it. Each and every one of those childhood vacations was a great experience, in part because my Mom took the time to plan it so.
So, back to the present, and our trip to Washington DC, I knew I had to plan everything perfectly. I requested the visitors guide, I got the guidebooks from the library, and I even used a few 21st century tools like Tripadvisor and Yelp. I looked into every possible thing we could do in DC, and plotted out the absolute best itinerary I could imagine. Of course, like my Mom, I know that the perfect itinerary never happens, that there are those times where you need a backup destination. The key is a plan that is also flexible. Imagine that everything will go as you want, that you will love every place you go to see, but allow yourself to adapt on the fly.
So, by time anyone reads this, I’ll likely already be in DC, and I can assure you, we will be all set to have a good time. The itinerary is eight pages of details in case things turn out to be perfect. And in case they don’t, don’t worry – I’ve got that covered too.
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