If you’re like most parents whose kids play baseball, softball or other summer sports, you’re likely right now either:
A)On vacation
B)Just back from vacation
C)Preparing to go on vacation
D)Currently losing your mind
With Little League tournaments over, we were only recently able to enjoy the few open weeks of summer to get away without conflicts. When your kids play sports, attend camps or are invested in other activities in which you or they have an emotional and/or financial stake, you tend to work around their schedules as much as possible. Even if that means cramming lake-sized summer vacation plans into a bathtub-sized opening on the calendar before the kids go back to school – also a vacation of sorts for parents, but that’s a topic for another day.
In our family, nothing says vacation like a trip to Minocqua in northern Wisconsin. The pilgrimage up Interstate 39/U.S. Route 51 is a family tradition passed down to our kids by my wife, and to her by her parents and their parents before them.
We don’t make it to the North Woods every year, but we go often enough that summer doesn’t quite feel like summer when we don’t.
Luckily, this summer now feels like summer, and we needed it.
To me, vacation used to mean simply traveling to a predetermined destination for the express purpose of seeing or doing what was there, a practical connotation grounded in the functional idea of it all: Go to Disney World to enjoy the Disney attractions; go to Washington, D.C., to tour our nation’s center of government and learn its history; go to Mt. Rushmore, Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon to relish truly unique sites.
In contrast, the idea of going to the same place every summer – to the same lake to do the same stuff, eat the same food and hear the same jokes – at one time would not have sounded like vacation to me. That was before I learned to appreciate a vacation for what it should really be – relaxation. It’s amazing how you can get caught up further and further in life’s daily grind without ever seeing it as it’s happening.
To combat that, one year while in Minocqua, I made a point of buying a pocket-sized memento to carry with me at all times, a reminder that when life starts to weigh on you, stop and remember what – and who – you’re doing it all for. Leaving life’s worries behind, if even for a matter of days, can do wonder for the psyche.
In Minocqua, we ride boats and go tubing, golf and fish, grill and chill. We go to the same restaurants, or stay in and cook the same meals, a far easier task than eating out with seven kids ages 11 and younger. Probably sounds a lot like your vacation, I’m guessing.
We drive the 25 miles to the place with the go-carts, bumper boats and water balloon fights, not necessarily the best go-carts, bumper boats or water balloon fights in the North Woods, but it’s the place we’ve always gone to, and so it’s the best to us.
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Alternating years feature other attractions like the lumberjack show, the petting zoo or the Min-Aqua Bats water show, the kinds of things that are fun to go do when you do them, but the sort that might lose a bit of their luster if you did them every year.
This year we stayed at our friends’ vacation home, a three-bedroom place with a full basement that used to accommodate my wife’s family comfortably before spouses and kids and such. Now, with 17 of us making the trip this year, we ran a bit short on space. So we hauled our camper the 350 miles north to set up shop in the driveway. For us, this vacation was BYOB – bring your own bed.
That made for the best of both worlds, the feeling of camping – also one of our regular summertime pleasures – with the comforts and amenities of a fully-stocked home right at our fingertips. We could enjoy our own space when necessary while also gathering with everyone the majority of the time.
Whatever your summertime vacation destination – and we all should have at least one – enjoy your time away while it lasts. You’ll likely be back to the hustle and bustle, to life’s worries and warts soon enough. Isn’t that the way it always goes?
Halfway through our vacation, I remembered that memento I’d bought several years before, now no longer carried with me daily, likely deposited in some drawer at home. It was a metallic stone engraved with one simple word: “prosperity.” Buying that stone was my way of trying to make myself stop and appreciate each day and all that we have.
Mid-trip this year, our oldest son confided in me that he loves going to Minocqua on vacation, and that he looks forward to taking his own family there someday.
Another successful vacation in the books.
Rob Manker is a freelance writer who lives, works and parents in Naperville.
Twitter: @RobManker