I wanted to get this post typed up before I flew out to New York, but I got tied up closing loose ends with work and packing. The trip went well and was a lot of fun, but now it’s back to the grind.

It had been a few years since our last vacation, my parents had gotten divorced, and I had gone on to high school. It was in the fall of my senior year when Mom floated the idea of us going on a family vacation. She had quite a bit of money stashed away that she’d been sitting on for a while, and decided it was time we all took a trip. She wanted to take us someplace warm, since we would be going the day after Christmas, and would actually spend New Year’s Eve there. She surprised us all by telling us she wanted to go to Hawaii.

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I’m changing up a little bit here. All of my posts have been about my 50 States Goal, and some memories from my childhood. I have the post about Hawai’i in progress, but I have put it on the back burner because I’ve been finishing up a book I’ve been working on. On Monday night, around 9:30, I typed the last few words of the book. It was such a surreal experience, but writing it was an absolute blast. I decided I’d comment here on the process of writing it, and then resume my tales of extra-State adventures. (more…)

It’s been a while since my last post (about two weeks, yikes!), but I alluded to last time talking about a return trip to Florida. I know I’ve already talked about Florida, but chronologically, it was the next place my family went after our Myrtle Beach adventures.

My parents had just purchased a little drive-in restaurant called Mug ‘n Bun, and while it was a nice change of pace for them, it also made their work weeks insane. Throughout the warmer months, my parents would work crazy 18 hour days and my sister and I would only see them in the mornings before school and a few minutes before we went to bed at night. My aunt who lived next door or my older sister would babysit us when we weren’t at school until the frigid winter months, when the restaurant closed earlier and my parents could afford to sneak away from work to be home with us. Incidentally, our vacations couldn’t take place in the spring and summer, and we started taking winter vacations, which were cool with us (edit: pardon the pun) because we could escape the chilly Decembers of Indiana for the much warmer Florida winters. (more…)