To a mouse...

I’m slowly learning that no matter how well I plan for a vacation I will not get to do all the things I want to do. I think a small part of this is that I want to do EVERYTHING. I know I can’t do it all, but I usually set out trying. This may have something do with the fact that we really didn’t go on vacation when I was growing up.

Honestly, I only really remember taking two vacations with my family. One was in High school and we went to London for three days. The other time we went to Charleston, S.C. to ring in 2000. Now, don’t get me wrong, it was a great vacation, but I really don’t remember any other time we traveled as a family to get away from where we were living. Often Friends and relatives would come and visit us in Japan; Italy; Florida; Washington, D.C., all those really fun duty stations. And even though we would sometimes travel to different cities when guest were visiting, I still think of those trips as us being tour guides, because more often than not we had already been to the sites in that town on school field trips.

Typically, Family Vacation was just a nice way of saying “we are moving this summer”. Just to catch the none brats up, this meant having one suit case between my sister and I for up to three months, traveling with a cat and a dog, not knowing when our household goods would arrive and possibly visiting a relative or two that we are not going to see for another 3-6 years. This is *not* a vacation, but it is what we got, and we made due (like reading in a hammock on the lawn at Grandma Panter’s in the middle of Tennessee or watching every two dollar movie at the base theater while being in temporary housing). Now some bases were definitely better than others. That fact did make some moves a bit easier, but these moves were the exception to the rule.

My little sister and I would also get to visit our Daddy during some summer breaks and a few holidays. This was more like what you may think of during a vacation. Yet we would cram so much in to these visits that I really needed a vacation from these vacations when I got home! In fact one trip was actually called our whirl wind weekend. I’ve even had a short story about that printed from a newspaper contest. I’ll have to dig that up for ya…

Regardless, all of these experiences have lead to my tendency to be a heavy planner. I have a need to fit it all in. I have a few friends trying their darnedest to break me of this habit. And it seems from my last trip across the pond even God is getting in on this re-programming.

I wanted to see everyone still living in Holland, enjoy the wedding, drop by and do a little intelligence gathering on a few city diplomacy initiatives, go shopping for things I can’t get in the States, meet my relatives, go to the Mauritshuis, go for a walk along the dunes, visit the archeological museum in Leiden, and read a book or two. Maybe, if it wasn’t too expensive and I still had time I would have gone to Krefeld for work. None of this really mattered. I only did a fraction of what I had planned to do, because by day four I was down a wallet and by day five I was stuck on the couch for half a week and crutches for the rest of my trip. (Oh and those readers who know where the title of this blog comes from get a gold star!)