Surviving a Long Family Vacation
So this is a follow up to my blog post on 1/31/16. We are now post-vacation. The vacation was AMAZING and no one wanted to go home despite being gone over 7 weeks. I was really surprised that I didn’t get home sick! Looking back, there are some things that worked great and some things. . .not so much. If you are looking to plan a long summer break, here are some tips we learned along the way.
First, don’t plan every single minute of every single day. I did have our travel bookings done ahead of time like all plane tickets and lodging. The only thing we booked along the way was our train tickets from Newport to NYC. Outside of a broadway show and Red Sox tickets, not many activities were planned ahead of time. In my travel book, I had highlighted places I wanted to see in each city, but didn’t plan how or which day we would see them. It’s fun being spontaneous and some days you just want to take it easy, especially the kids! During a long vacation, you need to have some down time to play cards or go to a playground.
If you are planning on visiting multiple cities, try to do a good mix of outdoorsy cities and touristy cities. After doing a week of solid sight seeing in Boston, we followed it up with a week and a half of hiking, boating and kayaking in the Thousand Islands, Lake Placid & Vermont. The change of pace was needed, and made the trip more fun.
Plan on shipping a couple of boxes home throughout the trip. If you think you won’t accumulate things along the way, you are kidding yourself. We ended up shipping two boxes. One about 3 weeks into the trip and then another box about 6 weeks in. One of them ended up being jeans and fleeces that we thought we’d need in New England in the summer. Wow, were we wrong! There were many days that it was just as hot in NE as it was in Austin if not hotter.
Lastly, have fun! There is always so much to see when you travel and you can’t see everything in each city. Don’t feel like you have to. You can always go back!
