Chaos and Cupcakes

Today at lunch, we roughly mapped out the next few years of vacations.  We are a vacation-loving family (especially now that Jared works from home or wherever there is good wireless internet access and the ability to find a quiet room while he’s on calls).

We were having a conversation about maybe taking a long weekend trip over to San Francisco sometime this summer.  Here’s an excerpt of the conversation:

Me:  “Do you guys want to go to San Francisco for a weekend this summer?”

Olivia:  “But I don’t know how to golf!!!!!” (Yes, that many exclamation points were needed to emphasis the depths of despair in her voice).

And then she proceeded to go on and on about how we can’t go to San Francisco until she learns how to golf.

Can someone enlighten me on the correlation between going to San Francisco and knowing how to play golf?  When we went to San Francisco a couple of years ago, there was no golf-playing going on.  I don’t know where she is getting this from!

This is often how our family planning meetings go.  But I firmly believe in letting the kids have a voice and a vote in these matters.  And I also think the things that come out of their mouths during these discussions are hilarious.

Taylor has far different ideas about where he wants to go on vacation than me.  For instance, today he tried to sway me into adding Okinawa to our destination list (he is into World War II history).  He thinks the places I want to go are too trite and touristy.  Just like Taylor, Jared also prefers to go to places with historical significance.  I want to go to places with a pristine beach and a glistening ocean.  Thus why we have to map it out a few years in advance so everyone is happy.  Since we went to California and stayed at the beach this year, Jared gets a couple of years beach free (party pooper).

Remainder of 2009:  Yellowstone (June) and maybe San Francisco

April 2010: Europe (without kids);    Summer 2010:  Seattle / British Columbia

Summer 2011:  Road trip to DC, NYC, and Boston

Summer 2012:  Hawaii

Now we just have to keep our fingers crossed that gas prices don’t sky rocket again (although I am sure they will anyway).