Over the past few weeks my husband and I have started to talk about our annual spring vacation. Each year about this time, we haphazardly decide that we’re going to pack up and visit somewhere, but neither of us can decide where we want to go until it’s almost time to get in the car. We’re pathetic, last-minute travelers like that. He’ll say he’s ready to go, but waits on me to tell him where. I don’t like the pressure of picking, so we banter back and forth for weeks before finally deciding to go.

I’ll excitedly hop online and start canvasing Google Maps for interesting places, grabbing flights for two, hotel rooms and a car before finding out that the cheapest flight to Katmai National Park in Alaska to watch grizzly bears will cost more than $9,000. Then I scale back and start considering a short trip to Indianapolis or Grand Rapids. History says that when given a choice to go big or go home, I stay put.

We have a guaranteed vacation spot in Bonita Springs, Fla., where my mother winters, but we’re the nomadic kind. I have yet to find a spot that has captivated me so much that I never, ever want to visit anywhere else. There is so much of this big, wide country I haven’t seen that I hate to limit myself to just Florida, which was the vacation place of my youth.

Tod and I have become extremely fond of a few places, including St. George, Utah, which has the most beautiful country I’ve seen to date, Gatlinburg, Tenn., as well as southern Arizona, with its arid climate — completely devoid of any humidity at all — has me now boycotting the southeastern states for good.

We have friends in Missouri, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho and Kansas, but who wants to impose? Fish, like vacationing friends, starts to smell after three days or so I hear.



This year, we’re considering California. A hail-Mary tip request to my Facebook friends led me to discover that most advised visiting San Diego, then driving up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco, then on to Yosemite. That sounds like fun to me. Heat, beach, bridge then woods. That sounds pretty diversified. As long as it doesn’t involve camping, I’m good to go. Tents and this girl are positively incompatible.

I have to admit, vacationing is much less hectic since we’re empty nesters. It was definitely worth the 18-year wait. We no longer have to plan our getaways around Disney characters, strong cell signal towers or sleeping within a 10-mile McNugget radius. There are fewer pit stops, and we don’t have to leave at 1 a.m. hoping the girls will sleep until Atlanta. We can go where we please, eat where we want, and listen to grown-up music. I’ll never ever forget the years of Raffi in the cassette player, I still know all the words.



Those were the days when we went on vacation at the same time, and to the same places as our friends. I’ll never understand the allure of seeing the same people, albeit 1,300 miles farther south than where everyone lived during the other 51 weeks of the year, but nonetheless, we went. Having a passle of your children’s friends nearby as a distraction was always a benefit when the grownups tried to relax a little bit.

Having no children to dictate their demands slightly impedes the vacation planning, leaving Tod and I like a sailboat without a rudder. We could go to Ireland, South Africa or Australia, but the flights are too long. We could go to Wisconsin, Maine or Nebraska, but I don’t consider ice fishing a neat way to spend a week off. The choices are endless and sometimes overwhelming.



I’d like to say I stood in the Redwood Forest. I’d like to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge and put my hands into the concrete where Judy Garland did many years ago and see the Pacific Ocean for the first time as we wind our way north into wine country. California can provide all that, and it sounds tempting.

No matter how tempting it sounds, it still translates into some serious scouting on my part. I’ll have to search for flights, rooms and rental cars. I’ll have to mentally prepare to be the co-pilot as we navigate our way through the westernmost state of the United States. Tod is always the driver because I can’t negotiate a roundabout without crying, and he values his life too much to put it in my hands that far away from home.

I’ve got my work cut out for me, and I better get on it. On the chance that I don’t get it together, I hear there’s a nice zoo in Indianapolis and very few Raffi fans.