Vacationing
The first eight years of our marriage, we really only took two vacations — our honeymoon, five days at a pretty cheesey Poconos honeymoon resort (Paradise Stream), and a week at the Jersey shore five years later. In ’93, it had been three years since that last one, and we’d just been through two horrendous years, finance-wise.
One day I came home from work, and Kathy announced that we were going to Disney World in May. I just laughed and said, “Yeah, right — after we win the super bowl?” She didn’t laugh — with a determined look, she said, “Yeah, right — we’re going. It’s already booked.” I had no idea how we were going to afford to go, but I knew, after eight years together, that when she said we’re doing something, we did it. I figured, “this is going to be interesting.”
And, it was — interesting. We went that May, then we went again the next May, with some friends. Then we went that fall. In between that second and third trip, we bought points in the Disney Vacation Club. We financed the points, and were able to go down a couple times a year with them. That next year, 1995, we actually went down three times.
Twenty-four years after our first trip down, we’re on something like our 36th or 37th time down here. It never really gets old for us. When we bought into the DVC, we were making a commitment to vacationing. We decided we wanted to do it more often. We’ve long since paid off our financing — now we just pay an annual maintenance fee, which isn’t that much.
We have our son and his friend, and his friend’s family, down, staying in a grand villa at Old Key West, the original vacation club resort, and still one of our favorites. We’ve stayed in most of the DVC resorts — there’s a bunch of them now — including the one in Hawaii. Old Key West always feels most like “coming back home” for us — our vacation home, that is.
Since it’s the first time down for some of the party, we did what we usually do when we have first-timers with us — booked an Epcot fireworks cruise. It’s the best. It’s a little-known thing you can do, where you board a pontoon boat over in the Yacht Club resort around 8 at night, they take you on a cruise around the body of water that connects the Yacht Club, the Beach Club, the Boardwalk resort, Hollywood Studios park, and Epcot park, giving you a history of it all, and you wind up on the edge of the Epcot lake, right between the United Kingdom land, and France, to watch the Epcot “Illuminations” fireworks show, up close and personal. Kathy was able to book it for our first night, an awesome way to begin the week. It was, as always, fabulous.
We’ve come to love our vacations, our time away from the hectic hustle and bustle of our daily lives in the D.C. area. We both love what we do, but our jobs, and our lives, can get a bit stressful (understatement), and it is necessary to periodically get away from all of that, and do this. We have just as much fun, whether it is just the two of us, or if we have a crew along with us, like we do this time. It’s all vacation, no matter which way you slice it, and we love our vacations.
We have massages booked for this morning, over at the Mandara Spa in the Dolphin resort. As if the first couple days have not done enough to melt away the stresses and pressure of DC living, this will put us in a state to truly enjoy the next five days of this.
The Magic Kingdom was all done up for Halloween when we visited that park, yesterday. We dined at the Crystal Palace, with Pooh, Tigger, and Eeyore, and crew.
Stress? What’s that?
