My Second Biggest Vacation Flaw: I Want to Do All the Things
In Mission: Wanderlust, I write and podcast about our family’s travel adventures and the things that we have learned along the way.
I don’t want to collect stuff, I want to collect experiences.
Maybe that’s the reason that I can’t relax while I’m on vacation. There are just too many things that I want to see and do and it just feels like such a waste of time to not do those things.
As with my inability to relax, my desire to do “all the things” has led to some questionable decision-making.
It starts with my vacation planning. I will come up with an itinerary, convinced that we can do everything that I have put on my list. Jeff will look at said list and tell me to take it down a notch or three. Cities get deleted, stops in some locations get extended, and I work to get everything we can out of our stops along the way.
Sometimes, it works to our advantage. Going non-stop for nearly every day our family was at Disney led to exhausted bodies, full hearts, and memories galore. We packed in five national parks in three states in less than two weeks and loved nearly every minute of it. We visited over twenty Texas State Parks in the six years that we lived in the state.
And I have learned that when we are going strong and seeing all of the things, it is important to take at least one “down” day to give our bodies time to recover and to keep our family from turning valuable bonding time into a battle royale.
But sometimes my desire to do “all the things” blows up in my face.
Several years ago Jeff and I decided to take a short camping vacation to Gettysburg for the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. While we had gotten a taste for the park on our quick trip back from Washington DC several years before, we knew there was a lot that we hadn’t seen and decided that a historical anniversary would enhance our child-free mini-vacation.
It was our first trip with our new-to-us camper, a Rockwood Roo, and we were excited to see what our family experience could be now that we had a camper that would theoretically help us get back into camping.
And I wanted to see everything that I could from Indiana to Pennsylvania.
We saw a lot, but my biggest fail was when I decided to take my husband, who was driving our truck and new camper for the very first time through an incredibly hilly region of the upper Midwest, on a quest to find the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio. We didn’t find the entrance to the visitor center with our limited GPS and I swallowed my disappointment while Jeff tried not to stew in the driver’s seat. It was a fool’s errand that he has never let me forget.
But it isn’t the only time that my plans have been bigger than reality.
There was the single day that our family spent in New Orleans during one of our many southern campsgivings. We walked all over the French Quarter and to Louis Armstrong Park and back to the Quarter looking for the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Site. Once upon a time, the site had been in Louis Armstrong Park, but it had been moved. We finally found it by chance as we were walking past, but it was after closing time and by that time, I had wasted at least an hour of our family’s time and forced plenty of walking. While we did get to explore a beautiful park and see more of New Orleans as a result, I got a deserved eye roll over my disappointment that I wouldn’t be able to get another National Parks stamp.
Most recently, it was our entire 2021 summer vacation, my attempt at grasping onto normalcy while everything else in our family life was far from normal. I was trying to achieve the perfect family vacation while we were facing a major move across the country that was turning our lives completely upside down. For so many reasons, it is to date the worst vacation that we have ever had as a family.
And I knew that I was trying to do too much as a family. I really should have known better.
I don’t know how to relax because I want to do all of the things and I want to do all of the things because I don’t know how to relax. When I’m not on a quest to do everything on my list I feel like I’m some kind of arbitrary accomplishment. Yes, I am fully aware that this is not the healthiest or even the most fulfilling way to vacation. And I need my family to constantly keep me in check, and they do. Or at least they try.
I am an imperfect work in progress just trying to take advantage of all of the days that God has given me on this earth.
I just need to be reminded to slow and enjoy my surroundings from time to time.
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