Recently my family took a little trip (800+) miles to the hills of Tennessee. I grew up there and we try to make it back every year at least for a few days. Now trips to visit family are not necessarily synonymous with vacations. I’ve even heard them called “obligation vacations.” In fact, I believe that most times when someone says “I need a vacation after my vacation” it’s because they went to visit family and had their time all chewed up with trying to see everyone and have everyone see them. When you have a family as large as mine, it’s just impossible to see everybody and over the years, I’ve become much better, to my mom’s dismay, in just saying “not this trip.”
I say all this just so I can say, this was not an obligation vacation. At least not that kind of obligation. Within the past year, my mom has had a battle with pancreatic cancer (not to mention breaking her arm a few weeks back) and my dad has recently had surgery on his back, so both of them are not capable of doing what they normally would do and in the summer that’s work around their home and garden. So this year my intent was to spend my time and energy on things that they would normally be doing if they could & guess what? We had an awesome trip! I won’t bore you with the details but I’ll just say that this was MY type of obligation vacation. Sprinkle in some really cool things that my folks did for us and we just had a great time.
There were three things that I learned on this trip and I’ll be sharing them in the coming days. Stay tuned and have a great August.
