The Countdown Begins!

Exactly one week from tomorrow, I will be leaving for my long-awaited Summer Vacation. I capitalize it because its important. Almost every summer, my parents, my sister and her family and occasionally a few other family members pack up and drive a really long way to the beach, where we usually rent a house for a week. For most of my life, our summer getaway destination of choice was the idyllic seaside resort of Cape May, New Jersey. Over the last few years, though, the perfect Victorian gingerbread-encrusted paradise of my childhood has been getting more and more crowded with tourists (my family does not consider itself "tourists" - we're practically locals, seeing as we've vacationed there for nearly 30 years) and more importantly, it has been getting more and more expensive. So, despite my family's innate fear of change, we've made the decision to spend our vacation week in an entirely new place - Atlantic Beach, NC. We've rented a big, completely stripped-down house that's literally right on the beach - no air conditioning, no dishwasher, and no tourists. I can't wait!

In my family, the build-up to going on vacation is almost as important as the actual vacation. Most of the places we've rented over the years were pretty strip-down places, which required that you bring your own sheets, towels, dishes, pots and pans, food, etc. So, about a month beforehand, my mother would haul these huge cardboard packing boxes out of the attic and set them up in various rooms of the house. Over those next weeks, they would slowly fill up with tons and tons of stuff, until they were just on the verge of being too heavy to carry. Then, late in the night before we were to leave for vacation, my dad would drive the family vehicle (sometimes a massive station wagon with wood-grain trim, sometimes an aqua-colored minivan) into the back yard, and we'd spend several hours loading the packing boxes and nearly everything else we owned into it. Looking back on it, I'm not really sure why we had to do this after dark, but that's the way it was every year. Then on the morning of departure my mom would wake me up at 4:00am, we would all stumble blindly into the Vacation Mobile, which was still sitting in the backyard and only by the grace of God had not sunk into the ground during the night, and we'd be on the road - still under the cover of darkness. BD remembers the early morning departure well, I'm sure - she came with the fam on several vacations, God bless her!

Anyway, with Summer Vacation '08 looming on the horizon, its time for me to start the preparations. Sadly, I will not be at my parents' house to witness the packing box set-up or the midnight car-packing, but I plan to start a few vacation-prep traditions of my own. This week is going to be awesome!