Our Stay-cation

It’s funny how you can take the things around where you live for granted, and put off visiting cool things in your area because "we can always go there." And then you never do.

For instance, our best vacation in the southeast Idaho area occurred three years after we moved from Idaho – where we had lived for almost nine years. Once we didn’t live there anymore, we realized we should have spent more time at the Grand Tetons and some other neat places, so we went back and did that. It was awesome -- but now we wish it was easier to get back there.

Before we moved from Las Vegas last year, we made a bucket list of things to do before we moved. Our kids toured Hoover Dam and saw the Grand Canyon and many parts of the Strip and lots of other things for the first time, all within the last two months of our almost nine-year stay there.

So we are determined to enjoy the neat things around our new home now, rather than wait until right before we move again (whenever that might be). For our vacation this year, we chose a stay-cation, spending the entire trip within an easy drive of our house.

We started with a day in D.C. with our good friends the Whites, visiting the American History, Natural History, Air and Space, and National Building museums. Our legs were tired, but it was fun. One word of advice from the kids – don’t eat street vendor pizza (the unanimous critique of the cardboard crusted glob of processed cheese: "Nasty"). We ended the day with Fuddrucker’s hamburgers; the burgers were good, and the kids enjoyed saying the restaurant’s name and making the adults squirm.

Another highlight was a full day at Hershey Park in Hershey, Pa. We drove up in the morning and were greeting with heat, humidity, a large crowd…and the smell of chocolate in the air. As the day wore on, the humidity and the crowds seemed to dissipate, but the delicious aroma lingered. We think that's what heaven will smell like.


Levi proved to be a roller coaster machine, riding anything that he was tall enough to get on, including a giant wood coaster (the Comet) and the Super Dooper Looper, complete with a loop. He was really nervous to ride the Looper because of the loop. But after the coaster completed its vertical revolution – and while it was still screaming around the track – Levi yelled “That was awesome! But I’m not riding it again!”

He rode it three more times.

The highlight of Hershey Park for Jason: vending machines with ice-cold Hershey’s chocolate milk for $1.25. Ahhhh.


Heat and humidity was the theme of the week, so we took one day to float the Shenandoah River near Harper’s Ferry, W.Va. The company that rented us the tubes and life jackets had a certain "Deliverance" quality about it, but we had fun, and the water was perfect. The most fun, though, was the high-speed ride in the old school bus that shuttled us from the end of the tubing run back to the parking lot. Dylan cracked us all up as he alternated between careening from side to side on the bus and mimicking the driver turning the oversized steering wheel.

We also took in a day at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. It was warm, and the sand was great. Unfortunately, a series of storms out in the Atlantic Ocean pushed in frigid water. We made the most of it by making sand sculptures (including sculptures containing each of the boys -- Carson as a turtle is probably the only one we ought to share, although Colin in a little cocktail dress and Dylan as a sexy mermaid were both pretty funny), splashing each other, and getting Friendly’s ice cream before leaving town.


We wrapped up where we started, in Washington, D.C. The view from the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial was breathtaking, seeing the Iwo Jima Memorial against a background of the Lincoln Memorial and U.S. Capital Building. The scene reinforced that this great Nation is built on the bravery and sacrifice of our Armed Forces.


In D.C., we ate dinner at Capital Q, a Texas barbecue joint in D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood that Jason frequented often during his many visits while he worked in the West. Pulled pork, brisket, smoked mashed potatoes, and cold sodas did our stomachs good.

Our final stop was at the Newseum, a fairly new museum dedicated to journalism and broadcast news. The kids figured they could find a way to handle an hour or two in another museum, but we spent about five hours there. Besides the cool exhibits, we had fun with their interactive exhibits and watched several short movies (including a creepy “4-D” movie, where you could feel the movie’s rats at your feet; newreel footage of Elvis Presley's career; and a documentary on journalists covering the 9-11 attacks in New York that choked us all up). Dylan even got to jump in the studio and "broadcast" from Wizards training camp.


So we checked off a good chunk of an early bucket list. And the good thing is, it's a big bucket, so we've still got plenty to do close to home.