What Vacation?

I am usually the first person counting down the minutes until the end of summer, wondering how I’m going to make it through the long, long days. But this summer, I concede, was too short. School starts on Monday and I’m looking around wondering where the days went, convinced that the Earth is spinning faster and the days are honestly getting shorter. I mean, I am still putting away papers from last school year – where am I going to put the influx from this one? And, oh yeah, when is my vacation?

For the most part, we stayed around town this summer. We have no annual vacation spot, and this year was empty of gatherings with out-of-state family and friends. So the kids did some day camps and we enjoyed the local activities, but I longed for a break.

Of course, traveling with two young kids is really no vacation. I still have to pack, clean, plan, and make meals and snacks for my family. It’s the same stuff in a different place, usually with less sleep. If anything, it’s more work, not the “vacation” of my childless years when a getaway was really getting away. Sometimes I forget this.

And so we planned a weekend trip. Our ultimate destination was Ben & Jerry’s Factory Store in Vermont, driven by our universal love of ice cream. We had a hotel booked, but no other constraints, so we let the road lead us and we stumbled across a few unexpected gems along the way. A friend recommended Yankee Candle Village in Deerfield, Massachusetts, which was a perfect pitstop on our drive up. The highlight of this large complex is their Bavarian Christmas Village where it “snows” every four minutes. Walking through the attached toy store, we were surprised to find Santa at his desk making his Naughty and Nice lists! Our kids were thrilled, especially when they learned they were still on the Nice list. But when their Dad was warned that he was on the Naughty list for hijacking the cookies and milk left out for Santa last year, they started conspiring to save him. A rare moment of siblings united.

Back on the road, filled with Christmas spirit, our first planned stop at Santa's Land in Putney, Vermont now seemed ideal. I had low expectations of this park, opened in 1957 and rescued from foreclosure last year, but when we pulled into the almost empty parking lot, I was concerned. The $10 entry fee and welcoming staff made it worth the gamble. It would be a stretch to call it an “amusement park”, more like a 1950’s alpine village, but that day it was all ours. In the center, it had a good old-fashioned swingset with a metal slide placed right on the grassy ground. You may see safety violations, but I saw my childhood, and it was refreshing. There was a bumpy unmonitored giant slide which we rode down on potato sacks before walking right back up the hill to go again. We toured the property multiple times on “Santa’s Alpine Railroad”, choosing a different car each trip, but passing on the driver’s offer to repeat the tour info. The one attendant running all the “kiddie rides” (carousel, cars, planes) let us choose one, and rode with us for as long as we wanted. There was a little schoolhouse showing The Year Without A Santa Claus on an old television, and an unattended gift shop that carried Dora the Explorer mittens among other random items. And there was Santa again, this time in a small shack suffering the summer heat with just a box fan to keep him cool. There were deer and llamas roaming the property, and we had to watch for poison ivy, but the kids loved it. No crowds, no parades, no characters, no long walks, just their own personal playground.

That night we made it to our hotel, and our trip turned from kitschy back to ordinary. The kids fought over the beds, we bickered through dinner, and watched television until our eyes closed. We awoke, had breakfast, and headed out. They complained all the way to Ben & Jerry’s, and I nagged my husband for buying ice cream before the tour. We saw a farm, watched cheese being packaged, learned to make maple syrup and apple cider, played minigolf, and marveled at the beauty of nature. Then we went home and I did laundry. Yes, it was a trip, but it still didn’t feel like we had a real vacation.

Then, the other day my son thanked me for giving him a great summer. He enjoyed the camps that filled most of July, but he cherished his unscheduled August days which blended late mornings lounging in pajamas with spontaneous drives to parks, play spaces, new restaurants, and even a museum of Pez. Nights stretched late, with long walks at dusk, dinners at the beach, movies on the couch. He enjoyed getting to spend time with his little sister, and I loved seeing them interact so much more than they get to during the school year when their schools and schedules differ. And despite all his complaining while we traveled, it seems our meandering trip through Vermont was a highlight.

“I love these stress-free days, Mom. I don’t have a care in the world,” he said. Now that’s vacation.