The Summer Without a Vacation Plan
Learning to accept a summer without a formally planned vacation
During the early years of my marriage, summer vacations were out of the question. My husband worked a job without PTO and my private school teaching job kept me working long after the students left the building. One summer, I twisted my young husband’s arm to convince him to take a week-long trip out to Nebraska for my extended family reunion for my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Planning the trip strained our marriage, while the actual trip put additional pressure on our already meager bank account.
During our childless years, our summers were spent taking occasional weekend trips up to Michigan to visit our parents and the lake or camping at some of our favorite state parks. One year, we combined a conference in DC (for me) with a couple of days exploring the nation’s capital and Philadelphia. But our vacation time was still limited to what we could do with the least amount of money.
Then kids brought different summer challenges.
When our daughter was a baby, we took a long weekend trip to the Smoky Mountains because we wanted family time before I returned to work. The next summer, we were moving two hours north, and our entire summer was consumed by too many changes to count. The following summer, we had another baby, and a year later, I was just starting to see the end of the graduate school tunnel.
Real family vacations were out of the question.
When our kids were four and two, my husband convinced me that we should buy a camper. I didn’t want to buy a camper. We didn’t have the money, and I just couldn’t think about the work it would take to get our family of four out to local state parks for weekend trips.
That summer, we took a trip without the kids to Gettysburg for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, taking our new-to-us hybrid camper for her maiden voyage. We then spent nearly every weekend we could for the remainder of the summer exploring Indiana state parks. We potty-trained our two-year-old son by having him pee whenever he felt like it in the woods. We visited playgrounds and took short hikes. The kids rode their bikes as far as they could, our son picking up rocks and pine cones to place in his tricycle’s back basket.
The next summer, we upgraded and continued our weekend explorations. We didn’t have time, money, or energy for full vacations, but we could embrace weekend escapes as a family. We dreamed of “someday” trips, places we wanted to visit with our camper in tow.
When we moved to Texas in 2015, my husband started working from home, the kids were more capable of helping us prepare for camping trips, and we had more disposable income. Summer vacations became the rule instead of the exception. Week-long trips during Christmas break and shorter Campsgiving and spring break trips also got added into the mix.
Over the past two years, we have gone all out with our vacations. Two summers ago, we went to Disney, fulfilling a promise I had foolishly made years earlier that we would return before our daughter started high school so we could see all things Star Wars. Last summer, we finally fulfilled our 20-year-old dream to take our kids to Yellowstone and were rewarded by being told by our two teenagers that it was the best vacation they had ever had.
Summer vacations have become both tradition and habit, which is one of the many reasons I’ve been struggling with the approach of a summer without a vacation plan.
The world feels a little more uncertain, the finances a little more tenuous, and parenting teenagers who have goals and needs makes planning all the more difficult. I wanted to take our kids to the Upper Peninsula. I wanted to explore northern Michigan with them and take my own first trip across the Mackinac Bridge. I wanted to soak up as much time with them as possible before our oldest leaves us in two years.
But I hesitated, and that hesitation turned to inaction.
Instead, we made smaller and shorter plans. We are returning to our camping roots from twelve years ago. We’ve reserved weekend trips and made plans for a short trip with my sister and brother-in-law to explore the Bourbon Trail while all of our kids are at camp or on school trips.1
Despite the fact that the kids and I still had to return to school for a few days after Memorial Day, we launched our summer of mini-trips with a weekend in Turkey Run, one of our favorite Indiana state parks. Because my husband used his camp scanner app to find our site, we ended up with two open spots and offered one of the spots to our daughter’s best friend and her parents, which gave us additional social time and kept her engaged.
We completed the Five-Mile Challenge. We had campfires and s’mores. We played a terrible game of washers. We enjoyed much-needed quality time with children who are growing up too fast and making plans for the future, plans that don’t include their parents.
I wrote in the epilogue to my most recent memoir:
As the kids get older, it’s getting harder and harder to convince them to commit to time with just their dad and me. And yes, cell phones and the television get more use these days. But our core value is always making sure we spend as much time outside and as much time together as possible.
Our Memorial Day weekend 2025 exemplified this. To be honest, we all struggled with our phones not working in the state park’s dead zone. The kids lost contact with their friends for a couple of days, and I just wanted to see the rest of the messages my sisters and parents had been sending back and forth. After a long day of hiking over six miles, we took some time to watch the start of the Indy 500 with our television antenna. And we were keeping tabs on the Pacers game as we wrapped up our final evening around a roaring campfire.
But I also watched our teenage children and one friend frolic through the rocks, creek beds, and ravines without a care in the world. Our daughter referred to our second day’s hike as whimsical, which made me smile. By the end of the weekend, I had slowly accepted that this summer was going to look different, but that didn’t mean we were missing out on exploring or precious hours together.
And I finally accepted that as a parent, that is what I need to focus on the most in this season of our lives.
For more about last year’s camping trip to Turkey Run, read the following post. And yes, beautiful places like this really do exist in Indiana.
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We only have two but my sister has four and all of our kids range from 8-16. We’ve been talking about doing this for years and this summer, all of the stars aligned.
Such beautiful pictures! We also spent more than we felt we could afford on family vacations and never regretted it!