MY TAKE by Rose McGlew
My head is spinning.
My husband Paul and I sat down at the kitchen table last night and tried to figure out our family’s vacation plans for the summer. It seems that after coordinating and paying for our kids’ activities we won’t be having a family vacation after all. I don’t remember any of this going on when I was a kid.
When I was younger our vacation plans included a two-week trip to Florida in July or August to visit my grandparents. My mother would pack my sister and me in the station wagon (sans car seats and seatbelts) and we’d hit the road, staying in an exotic Days Inn in South Carolina on the way down and back.
When we moved to Florida after my parents’ divorce, the opposite trip took place. My sister and I boarded an Eastern Airlines flight to Newark and stayed with our dad for the summer. That was the extent of vacation planning in my family. What we did at our final destinations was pretty unstructured. Hit the beach, a trip to Great Adventure and that was that.
My husband’s family vacations were more planned out, but not by much. They went across country every four years to visit his grandparents in Oregon. End of story.
Our children are very much the beneficiaries of our lack of summer activities as children. As Paul gets older, Jacob reaps the benefits as well everyone is allowed to do more, as evidenced by the additional gray hairs I have after last night’s strategy session. Here is the tentative plan:
Both boys are involved in Scouts, so Jacob will go on a weekend trip with Dad up to the Kittatinny Mountain Scout Reserve in northern New Jersey. That will happen just after school lets out.
Paul will go to Camp Rodney on the Eastern Shore in Maryland for a week in August. Don’t ask me how we’re going to get through that he’s never been away from home for more than a night. I’m not sure who’s going to wish he were home more… me or him.
In addition to each of their separate Scouting adventures, there will be overnight camping trips locally and rafting down the Delaware. There’s usually a baseball game to catch with the other Scouts, too. And that’s just off the top of my head.
In addition to Scout camp, the kids are interested in attending day camp around here. After I picked my jaw up off the table while looking at some of the prices of local camps, I re-opened the brochures from the YMCA and from the School-Age Fun and Enrichment (S.A.F.E.) program at the Sharon School. Not really wanting to join the "Y" again just so they can go to Spy Camp, it looks like the boys will do a two-week stint in the mornings at Sharon.
Of course, what summer vacation is complete without a visit to the grandparents? The boys will jet to Florida for a week to visit my folks on the Atlantic side of the state. We’re not sure what the exact plan is for down there. They may go for a week together. Or separately. Or they may each do two weeks one week together and one week separately. All I know is that it’s two plane tickets and at least two trips to the airport.
Of course, all this fun and frivolity will culminate at the end of the summer with a trip to Lavallette for Labor Day weekend. At least we all get to go on that trip.
So I guess it’s a good thing that I ended up getting a part-time job, right? I tried to keep that in mind as I put the slick new brochure from the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism away. Besides, when would we have the time?
Rose McGlew is a resident of Robbinsville. Her column appears weekly in The Messenger-Press.