Of course, getting there is important. You paid for the hotel room. The theme park tickets. You have to make the flight in order to get to the beach.
But do you have to make the flight miserable?
It’s strange. Most of us look back on our own childhoods as needlessly stressful, see that our parents were awfully hard on us—yet the second we start traveling, we seem to turn into them.
The trip, we need to understand, is part of the trip. Getting there is not separate from the vacation. So if the point is for our family to be together, if the point is for us to have fun together, to relax together, to get closer together, we need to start much earlier. Planning the trip should not be a nightmare. Packing up should not be a nightmare. Being on the road should not be a nightmare. Leaving to go back home should not be a nightmare.
The worst part about all this is the unfair expectations it puts on the trip itself. Now it has to be worth all the headache and arguments and tension that went into making it happen. Instead of just being what it can be: Fun. Time together. Getting from one place to another.
Relax. That’s the whole point of the vacation, isn’t it? It’s not to get so stressed that you need a vacation from your vacation…or be so uptight and anxious that your family needs a vacation from you.
