Vacation Time!

It’s spring break for my kids so we’ve headed out for family vacation. Nothing too fancy, we’re simply down in Southern Utah to enjoy Nature. We’re staying in a hotel tonight, but starting tomorrow we’ll be camping in Zion’s National Park for the rest of the week. We’ll be coming back on Sunday. Our plan is to not have a plan, that is we are not making any schedules or tight objectives, that’s the only way it could be a vacation. Our lives are so structured and scheduled that the best way to take a break from that is to not have any expectations and no commitments. So we’ll be hanging out at Zions and seeing stuff. Some things on our list of stuff we might do include going down to Vegas for a day, going to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, going to Petrified Forest National Park, going to Phoenix to visit my Grandmother, see the sights around Zions, see the sites around Bryce Canyon National Park and whatever else strikes our fancy.

When we set out we had no reservations anywhere and weren’t sure where we would stay the night. That all depended on what we felt like doing and whether something we drove by struck our fancy. We talked about maybe staying in Cedar City or St George, but Hurricane was never on our list. The reason we stayed here is that it’s right next to the entrance to Zions. In fact, this morning all we had scheduled was to leave. We didn’t set a time, not even an hour. It was just get up, make a list of stuff we needed to do before we left and when we were done with that, leave. We ended up rolling out around 2 pm. We had thought yesterday that we might camp at Zions tonight if we got down here before dark, that idea was ended by when we ended up leaving town.

So does this sound crazy to you; A week vacation with no plans? It’s actually REALLY nice. With 8 kids, our lives are constantly filled with stress to be places on time etc. Today itself has been a big break and very relaxing because our only goal was to leave today. I usually hate vacations because they are fraught with stress to be to the airport or to the hotel or whatever at a certain time. That’s not really a vacation, it’s doing something different but doing the same things – working to meet an objective and keeping to a schedule.

As we lumber through the next week, I’ll be blogging updates on our vacation when I have a chance, reporting our steps along the way on my Twitter feed, and hopefully uploading some beautiful photos of Southern Utah to my Flickr feed if you are interested in following along.