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…)

This will be the first post concerning my trips to other states that I mentioned in my last entry. It’s one of my first memories of vacationing in another State, so I thought it would only be appropriate to start here. I was going during Spring Break when I was in second grade with my uncle Clint and his new wife Michelle, along with my cousin Audra and older sister. He came late Friday night in his navy blue Buick with his Sea-Doo in tow, ready to drive us all down to Pensacola, Florida. It was going to be a long trip down, since we were driving straight there. It was something like a 16 hour drive, but to an 8-year-old mind, it’s a veritable eternity to sit in one spot for that long. (more…)