Vacation Distribution

Since we are in the midst of summer vacation season, at a recent staff meeting I asked folks as an icebreaker to talk about a vacation memory.  Mine was when my dad, in a fit of frugality that was impressive even by his lofty standards, packed dozens of ham sandwiches for a long weekend hiking excursion, and then the next year when we went on vacation and he took us out to dinner, I worried that he was dying because it seemed such an uncharacteristic splurge. 

I was delighted by the diversity of responses my icebreaker question engendered.  Some were sweet and others were side-splittingly funny.  What I was not prepared for was that, unprompted, a surprisingly high number of people said that they literally did the exact same vacation every summer.  Which was astounding to me, since I don’t think my family ever did the same thing twice during my entire childhood.  And it wasn’t borne of a luxurious lifestyle in which we could sprinkle our leisure opportunities across many awesome choices, but more so that once we went somewhere there was never a sense that you would need to go back there because “we’ve already done that before.”

But I get why you’d want to go to the same place over and over again.  What is vacation but a set of cherished shared experiences, in which case why not have a place and a set of activities that you revisit over and over again, which become part of the story of your childhood.  Indeed, many tourist destinations trade on this feeling of nostalgia and sameness, for example that the ice cream shop on the boardwalk that you take your daughter to for her first cone is the very same one your mom took you to when you were a kid.

Now that I am curating my own kids’ childhood experiences, I realize we’ve found somewhat of a happy medium.  We have our cherished destinations, like Rehoboth Beach (for the whole family) and Miami (for just me and Amy).  We don’t go to those places every year, but we have been back multiple times.  But other than that, we spread around our explorations, and once we’ve hit a place we rarely consider that we’d go back and we certainly wouldn’t go back and do the exact same things. 

Because I’m a nerd, here’s an inventory of where we’ve been.  Note how lumpy the distribution is, in that there are a small number of repeat locations and a bunch of one-off locations, and not a whole lot in between.

Family – Chicago (1), Toronto (1), Los Angeles (1), train trip down West Coast (1), train trip across US (1), USVI (2), Williamsburg (2), DC (2), Poconos (2), Hershey (2), Rehoboth (3), Ocean City (6)

Kids-free – Oklahoma City (1), Richmond (1), Wilmington (1), St. Louis (1), Boston (1), Brooklyn (1), Phoenix (1), Rehoboth Beach (1), Orlando (1), Miami (3)