Have you made plans yet? Have you made reservations yet? How many feet above sea level will you be? Will you need a passport? Will you take a car, a plane, a train, or a boat? Hotel, B&B, or tent? Ski lodge, by chance?
Are you taking more than one summer vacation?
I’m planning on taking three, one of which I just returned from. But the granddaddy of vacations for me is Martha’s Vineyard. I just finished making my hotel reservation. It will be my 15th summer vacation there. (I have also done one fall vacation and one winter vacation there.) I plan to spend most of my time at 1 foot above sea level with extended periods of several feet below. And this year I’m taking 7 days instead of the usual 5.
Belize! Combining a Living Social deal and a Groupon, a friend and I are jetting off to 10 days in Belize around the 4th of July (I have a long standing tradition of being in other countries on the 4th of July. . . America. . . fuck yeah? :p).
The first part of the vacation will be at a neat jungle resort/spa and we’re going to go see all kinds of exciting Mayan ruins and other fun stuff. The second half of the trip is on a teeny island that looks like my idea of paradise. Don’t believe me? Check it out! Each of the huts is a room, so there are only 8 or so on the island-- but they are super nice and even have Wiis in them! Ridiculous, but it’ll be fun.
I can’t wait to snorkel. In fact, I learned a fact I had no idea about- that Belize has the second largest barrier reef in the world (which I can take a little trip to go snorkel at!). My only major disappointment is that I won’t get to swim with whale sharks. I guess the whale sharks are there from April through June, so we’re just missing them. Hopefully, the whales get lazy, so I can take a picture like this.
I’ve never been to Martha’s Vineyard- what kind of things are you going to do on your trip?
We are hoping to be expecting kiddo #2 by the end of the summer, which would mean no booze, sushi, scuba diving or hot tubs for me, so we are not making reservations for anything (also, that money will go toward upgrading my sedan to a minivan). We are hoping to make two week-long trips to visit my parents in northern Michigan though, and there is lots of fishing, kayaking, canoeing and hiking up there.
I must point out that I feel that this thread is discriminatory against those in the southern hemisphere.
Having said that, I just got back from my only real summer vacation this year, which was a week in Pensacola, FL with the close family.
Planning a short hiking/backpacking couple day trip over the 4th of July as well…afraid my schedule won’t allow very many more overnight trips this summer! Maybe next year.
Well, I will be working straight through this summer. Last summer was a lot of fun though. I drove from Venice, Italy through Slovenia to Budapest. Stayed for a couple days, then drove through Romania to check out Dracula’s Castle in Bran and then to Bucharest.
After a day or two in Romania, drove to Bulgaria, staying 2 days-1 Night in Sofia and then checking out the big Monastary up in the mountains. From there, drove into Greece. Stayed about a week checking out Termopylae, swimming in the Aegean, watching the sun set behind Mt Olympus, then staying at a nice hotel in Athens. Drove from there to Delphi to see the ruins there and then on to Monte Negro via Albania and Bosnia. A day in Monte Negro on the water and then about 4 days at a nice resort in Drubrovnik, Croatia. After relaxing at the resort, drove back to Italy and then flew to Egypt for a couple days. From Egypt, I flew to Jordan for about 5 days, checking out Petra, the Dead Sea, and Amman. Then flew to my home in Florida, and spent a week with family.
Yes, I needed my passport. What a great summer it was.
See, now I would have completely ignorantly assumed the water was too cold there to comfortable snorkel, but that might just be my inner-Californian wimp side showing.
We don’t do summer vacations. The summer is absolutely gorgeous here, and there’s more stuff to do than we have time for. In between world-class mountain biking, crazy good kayaking, sitting on the beach, boating, hiking, and all the various festivals in town, we don’t need to leave.
Spring and late fall are our vacation months. Speaking of which, I should be planning a fall vacation…
For one thing, I have that hearty New Englander gene, which means I’ll swim in ice water if I have to. And the Vineyard is in the Gulf Stream, which makes it about 10 degrees warmer than the waters in other areas. It’s not SoCal, but it’s nice.
Key West again for us. We go every year mainly because of cheap airfare. We’ll head there on July 4th and stay for about a week. Generally we do a whole lot of nothing. Eat, Drink, Sun, Sleep, Repeat.
We might pick out a restaurant or two ahead of time, but mostly it’s unscheduled.
So:
Sea Level - 0-10 ft
Passport - No, but the Conch Republic used to issue them
Transportation - Plane - Car
Lodging - Renting a house
Might try to sneak in a trip to NOLA later in the year. I live in the south, yet seek out even hotter climates in the dead of summer. I think that comes from all the cold I absorbed living in Michigan.
We got back from our first RV trip (for this summer) last week. We spent a month in the Southwest and hit 19 different pueblos, National Parks and National Monuments, including Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Zion, Bryce, Chaco, Bandelier, Capitol Reef, Canyon de Chelly, Hovenweep, Aztec, Natural Bridges, Canyonlands, Arches, Monument Valley, Pecos, Wupatki and some others. We even took a side trip to the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Because of my wife’s extreme planning skills, we were also able to spend a couple of days near Albuquerque and several days in Santa Fe.
Excellent, if tiring, trip. Elevations remained somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 feet for most of the trip. Lots of low-level hikes (neither of us is fond of heights), including one down into Bryce Canyon to get up close and personal with the hoodoos.
We’ll likely take a shorter trip in the fall out to eastern Oregon to visit some relatives and friends, and maybe up to Bellingham, WA to do likewise.
Nice! I was there once, for only a few hours, but I loved it. And that was in late December. There’s a restaurant called Red Fish Blue Fish that has an amazing breakfast dish. It’s eggs benedict with crab cakes and key lime sauce. OMG it was good!
I usually take my big “summer” vacation the last 3 weeks of May. This year I road-tripped from San Jose out to Colorado with no particular itinerary in mind. I think the highest pass I went over was Red Mountain at 11,018ft. The weather in the Rockies this time out was fantastic.
One might say I took a Florida “vacation” in March. The real reason I was there was to visit my father in a hospital, but I made sure to take advantage of the hotel’s pool several times a day. The weather was perfect for it.
That sounds really cool. Did you see much of South America?
We’re planning three days in Boston to see all the museums with the kids and then a week in a two bedroom cabin on Cape Cod in July. The cabin is a three minute walk to a private beach.
This is our first summer as parents. Crusoe is not keen on taking the little 'un on a plane, so we are taking the Eurostar to Bruges for a few days at the end of June, and then the little 'un and I are going to Zante for a week with my mother (who has no qualms about taking a baby on a plane) in late September.
Mid-July. We’ve booked a cabin right at beginning of the cape in East Sandwich. We plan to sit on the beach, have a clam bake, explore local parks and whale watch. I love the cape. It’s so beautiful. My last visit was about ten years ago. I’m very pleased with the rental. We have two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a private beach all for about $150 a night at the height of the season.
