Vacation Destinations

Throughout our child-raising years Sarah and I have made a point of planning vacations to diverse destinations. I feel we did a good job of combining raw and expensive fun (Disneyworld – more times than I wish to recall,) the great outdoors (a most memorable week on a dude ranch in Colorado, fishing trips to Canada, multiple skiing trips in Utah and Colorado) and global education (two extended visits to various parts of western Europe.) Now, I’m not bragging on any level. Surely we were blessed with the resources to provide these opportunities to our children, some of their friends and to each other. And as great as most of these excursions were they each had negative aspects. Expense was a constant. Other potential downsides included illness in foreign countries, sunburn, altitude sickness, mosquito bites, too much cotton candy and broken bones. The one potential danger that never arose during any of our vacation planning was being arrested for espionage. This is because we never really considered a backpacking trip to Iran.