Travelling

Jen and I often talked about travelling the world or just travelling the USA while we were working. I suppose it is a dream of a lot of people to travel and experience locations not always unlike your own in landscape, but culturally different. And, of course, there are those places that are so extremely different that seeing it with your own eyes could be the only true appreciation of God’s handywork. Jen wants to travel abroad as much as we can as long as we can, and I understand her desire. I on the other hand have but a couple of places that really interest me. Mostly though, travelling the USA and seeing all the National Parks and Monuments is still at the top of my bucket list. I know it isn’t stretching my imagination or providing myself with some cultural exchange to better understand the diversity of others that share this planet, but how many people can say they took advantage of seeing everything their own country has to offer? Not many, in fact, I would guess most people of the world don’t travel. It has always and will always be an elitist activity. Why? Because it requires an expense account that is capable of discretionary spending without the worry of having to go back to work in one’s seventies to live out their days. I want to travel, but honestly, it’s a pain in the ass. Luggage, transportation, dining, massages, tours, expeditions, cameras and lens, fuel, etc. it all adds up to stress and anxiety and no way inviting the relaxing and energizing situation we all hope for in the process of taking a vacation from our normal lives. In our case, we are retired and have spent a small fortune on turning our own little Casa De Wilson into somewhat its own resort. We dream of the day we complete all our projects and can sit back and relax to the enjoyment of our creation.

We are so close to a trip we have literally been paying for in advance for 5 years. We leave for South Africa this fall on an eleven day or so photo safari. It is second on my bucket list of maybe five places to visit. Everything about it is crazy even to think about and if after the experience it lives up to our own hype, then it will provide stories and memories for the rest of our lives. Not to mention the wall decorations for the game room and guest house. In this case, as an all-inclusive, we will have paid for everything upfront apart from the plane flights. Maybe this is how everyone should choose a dream vacation. None the less, I’m less stressed about that trip than trips we take to Hawaii almost every year.

Hawaii and it’s splendor. For many years, I thought of the tropics as the last place I would want to go. Now, I think of it as the last place I want to go, but in a different context. Many have looked at us crossways for getting into the timeshare ownership. For us, it was simple, create a situation that made us get away from work. Now that we are retired, it has become an easy way for us to spend some individual time with each of our kids and grandkids. We love the times when all eighteen of the immediate family can get together. But that time to focus on just one kid and their family, really is special and seems to draw us closer to each of them in the end. We also have a timeshare in South Lake Tahoe. Less costly in the initial purchase, but of my, when you add in the wine junket to the trip it can pose some unique conversations and memories. South Lake might be in the top five of most beautiful places in the USA. But maybe not for everyone. As I mentioned, for most of my life I never had the desire for the tropics. Why? Because I truly believe I was a mountain man or Native American living off the land in the western mountains of this great country. I grew up in the mountains, it is in my blood. As I’ve grown older, the cold that comes with mountains in the winters is not very desirable, but it is hard to beat a mountain lake and a trout on your line. For me anyway, this is my utopia. If I could never experience anywhere else in the world I would be ok as I long as we could go to the mountains. However, twenty years ago, my mind and vision became slightly altered when we went on my first trip to Hawaii. It was like magic. And every year we have come back, my feeling is the same. We are here today as I’m writing this and I’m at peace once again and already centered. Cort and her family are with us and already we have joy in this vacation as one smile from little Charlie’s face talking about the ocean water and we are happy beyond belief. Every trip we get to spend with our kids and grandkids make us feel this way. To be honest, our moving away from all the kids and seeing them on a routine basis, certainly left a hole, but I’m not sure if it’s a hole so big, that it doesn’t overflow every time we get to spend the one-on-one time for a week. So, to those that scoff at our timeshare ownership and the so-called blank check due to the annual maintenance fees, put a value on the joy of the time with our family and tell me it wasn’t worth it.

I suddenly am thinking about the trip to Hawaii with all five kids, where Jen and I had the idea of a bonding vacation for our newly blended family. The world changed following that trip for this family, and we came away feeling like a normal family. How much would anyone pay for a lifetime of a blended family to look at itself and refer to each other as mom, dad, brother, and sister even knowing there are other parents out there? Not step this or that, just the simple acceptance as we are a family that was meant to be. We’ve never tried to take away the importance of the outside parents, but we singularly wanted each kid to know that forever they had others to trust and rely on. When it boils down to it, that is what makes us feel as family. Not trying to take away from the blood bonds of the two groups of kids, but to add another bond not by blood, but by love. This is what Hawaii represents to us.

The Cali-Girl-Cation with the girls and me to chauffeur. The Tahoe trips with Erica and family and with JD and family, the entire family trips to Hawaii all make travelling fun, exciting, and memorable. But as we are to experience next month, we will have the first ever week with a couple of the grandkids as their parents go on an anniversary trip. A week at Casa De Wilson and the memories we’ll have from that week, hopefully will promote more and more of vacations to our little resort, even if only with the grandkids. Send them our way, it will only make life sweeter as we get to share our little world and hopefully the magic we see in it will translate to them for years to come.