Vacation: All I Ever Wanted
I went on vacation last week. No, I’m not going to display my pictures here. You can visit my Flickr stream if you want to see classy photos of Easton and Gettysburg Pennsylvania or Ken Newquist.
No, instead, I want to share the results of The Vacation Plan. The plan was this:
- There is no booking of hotels before the vacation. We do everything from the road.
- We have no idea where we will wind up day to day.
- No more than five hours in the car on any given day.
- We go until the money runs out.
We started a week ago Friday with $1500, a minivan, three kids and a mother-in-law. It was decided that the best way to begin was to visit Easton, PA, home of the Crayola Factory. On that first day, we broke rule #3. Easton is a long, long way from Cleveland. Admittedly, we probably could have shortened the trip by not going to Pittsburgh to visiting Affogato1, but hey, I’d been trying to get there for a while, I thought I’d indulge myself. Good coffee, and Victoria, the owner, is a real sweetie.
Seven and a half hours later, we found a room in Easton, paid more than we thought it was worth, and grabbed dinner at a local pub. Next day, we had the fun of meeting Ken and his darling kids for a day at the Crayola Factory. We happened to arrive for the 15th anniversary of the museum/oversized hands-on preschool. Frankly, it was swamped, but it was also amazing. Creativity gone wild, kids making things out of modeling form, construction paper, markers, crayons…I felt like a little kid myself.
We thought that we’d head on to Valley Forge the next day, spent a couple of hours, then on to Gettysburg. Then, math happened. Gas was a real killer. Within the first two days, we’d burned through the first third of our cash.
Plans were amended, much to our benefit. We decided to skip Valley Forge and head straight on to Gettysburg. With the heat wave rolling over the midwest, three hours of battleground touring caused tempers to fray and exhaustion to mount. That night we welcomed the sweet, sweet air conditioning of the Motel 6, and later, the most excellent dinner and cold beer of the Appalachian Brewing Company.
The next morning, breakfast was had and we’d had enough education, it was time to be moving on toward home and some more familiar territory. On to Monroeville to the local Barnes & Noble for the kids to spend a little of their hard-saved vacation money, and then to scenic Hermitage PA. The local pizza joint was excellent, and as a view into local culture, it was educational. The pizza place, bar, and gun range were all in the same strip mall.
Finally, even the kids were done with pools and hotels. We packed up, made one more stop off at an outlet mall to get a little something for my wife, and headed back home. All told, we did not spend every last cent (we had about $100 left), but we did cut the trip short from the originally hoped-for seven days to four.
In the end, it’s not really about the money or the time…the experience of a family vacation, free of real plans or schedules was massively relaxing. I highly recommend trying it out sometime.
- The cafe where The Baristas is filmed. I like this webseries. Read my review. [↩]
