Unvacation

This post was supposed to be a wrap-up of a trip Dan, Sam and I were taking to Duluth to play in an indoor waterpark and look at Christmas lights. We hadn't taken any vacations in years, if you don't count the obligatory go-visit-elderly-relatives-so-they-can-see-Sam trips, which I don't. Dan and I have left town and stayed in hotel rooms exactly two times since our honeymoon, and we've been married for 6 1/2 years. I'm 99% certain that we've never left the state of Minnesota together, ever.

I used to love travel. In high school, I visited Europe with my foreign language class. I visited New Orleans with a church youth group, and Orlando and New Orleans a second time with the high school band. As an adult, I drove to Las Vegas to help my brother move there for school, and flew there the following Christmas with my parents. As a child, my parents took us on many family vacations, and while I hated the long car rides, it was a good experience for me to see a place that wasn't familiar.

Dan, on the other hand, hated travel when I met him, and he's still not much of a fan. Any time he slept away from home as a kid, it was because something bad had happened (their house burned down) or something bad was happening (they were visiting relatives who were unkind, to put it very mildly.) When he has time off work, he would like nothing better than to just stay home and relax.

I did convince him that we needed to get out of town for a few days for our honeymoon. We drove up to Duluth and stopped for lunch, then headed further north to Grand Marais, which was lovely the second to last weekend in May. It was about a week before Memorial Day, so it wasn't crowded, and we got a free upgrade to our hotel room. We meandered around town, checking out little shops and eating in small independently owned restaurants. One day we visited Gooseberry Falls, which was surprisingly really fun--did you know Dan likes hiking in the woods? Neither did I. Lesson learned: Dan hates the idea at first, but once he's there, he usually has a good time.

Some time later, a friend got married up north, so we drove up and stayed overnight in a hotel. It was more driving on two-lane roads than Dan would have liked, and I don't really count it as a vacation. Then a few years back we visited some friends who had moved to Waseca. We got a hotel room, since they had cats and I am highly allergic. We took one day just to ourselves and visited New Ulm, which was fun if low-key.

And that's it. I don't think we've ever done anything more than that. The last time we took Sam to visit Grandma Loretta, we took our time getting there and back, stopping about every hour or so, and he did much better with the car trip than most of the other times we've taken him long distances. So I was really optimistic about Duluth, Edgewater, and Bentleyville. Unfortunately we've all come down with a nasty cold, and I had an ear infection, so we had to cancel. At least we were able to cancel in time not to be charged for it. We plan to reschedule, but part of the appeal was that Dan and I both had Thursday and Friday off, so we could go Thursday and Friday night, leave Saturday, and be home in time to decompress and get ready for our week. Who knows when I'll be able to get another Friday off?

Next post: What we did instead! Expect lots of kleenex, amoxicillin, and nasal decongestant. Yeah, we know how to party. :(