Help me plan a Summer vacation

solost
Tue, 27 May 2025 14:07:54 +0000
In My Humble Opinion

My wife has given me more or less carte blanche to plan a Summer vacation for us. Now that our kids are grown, we want to start taking two vacations, just the two of us-- Winter and Summer, every year. This past February we went to Jamaica and had a fantastic time.

For a Summer vacation, we want to see a bit of the good ol’ USA. So probably driving. One week. Thinking sometime in August. I haven’t decided, if we drive, how much we will rough it. My wife doesn’t mind camping, as long as it’s not more than a few days, so maybe I bring gear, we camp a couple days, then for the second part of the trip maybe we book a nice place to clean up and get pampered a little. Or no camping- still working that out. But we do want to experience outdoors, woods and wildlife for at least some of the trip.

We briefly considered travel by train, but my wife feels like it would be difficult to plan to see and visit things along the way from a train, that the train trip would basically become most of the vacation-- just seeing things from the train. Which doesn’t actually sound that bad to me. So travel by train is not 100% out, but down on the list.

If we drive, here are my thoughts so far on the 4 cardinal directions to choose from (from my home base of SE Michigan, driving probably no more than 500 miles):

North is kind of out, just because we did a vacation in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula last Summer, which was great, but something a bit different is in order.

For West, Wisconsin is a strong contender. Other than driving through, I’ve never really visited the great state of Wisconsin. I started a Wisconsin thread once, jeez, over 10 years ago now, when we were going to do a family trip to Wisconsin that never happened for various reasons. I’ve also read through this other Wisconsin thread, so I have a lot of Doper-approved ideas already if we do choose to go there, but please share anything new or unique, or whatever. If we DID do a train trip, it would probably be somewhere out West further, maybe out to Colorado and back?

South is a thought since we want to do this Kentucky cave kayak tour sometime. Then I could get in a visit to the US Air Force museum in Dayton that was a topic of this recent thread. But after that I got nothing. Also not sure how much time I want to spend in deep Red State America. And the cave kayak tour we could really do any time of year since it’s underground and always 50-some degrees. We could do a weekend trip in the Fall or Winter.

East…maybe? I’ve driven up and down the East coast a little bit and enjoyed it. I like lobster shacks. We did a D.C. vacation with the kids back when Obama was still in office and it was a very nice trip, but been there, done that, and don’t want to return in this climate. Also the coast might be a little further than I want to drive.

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