We just got back from vacation yesterday. We spent time in Yellowstone and Utah (visiting my family). There’s a lot to write about (and I won’t get it all in one post).

Vacations mean a lot to me. I grew up in Utah, and my family went on a vacation almost every summer. Memories of some of the trips we went on stand out as the best memories of growing up. I want our children to have the same experience.

I can remember many different vacations we took. I’ll have to write more about some of them later. I’ve never written them down. I remember swimming in a glacier fed lake and coming out shivering (my parents chose not to join us in the water for some reason :-). I remember the vacation where we took a ferry ride down the coast of British Columbia. I remember the time we were exploring a ghost town that was on a map in southern Utah and we spent all afternoon exploring, then we drove on and a short time later we saw a sign to the town we thought we’d been at, so we’d been exploring a ghost town that wasn’t listed on the map. I’ll write about some of these later.

Growing up in Utah, the vacations we took all had a similar theme: exploring the western US (primarily Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and into British Columbia), usually camping. For me, that is what a vacation is. I can enjoy visiting cities or museums, amusement parks or historic buildings, but that’s not what a vacation is. A vacation is about being outside in the forest, mountains, desert, or beaches of the Pacific.

One of my goals is to take a family vacation at least every other year so that my family has those same experiences. Of course, living in Florida, the places I want to go are a lot harder to get to than they were growing up in Utah, so I don’t think we’ll be able to go every single year, but at least every other year should be possible.

Two years ago, I took Heather to Bryce canyon. This year was Yellowstone. In a couple of years… who knows.

I’ll write about Yellowstone in another post.