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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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…)

There were a couple summers during my elementary years where my family would load up our minivan and head down south to meet my aunt, uncle, and their three children for a big trip to sunny South Carolina. Our destination was Myrtle Beach, located on the northern border of the State, and we were going to be staying in a penthouse. We would always leave very early in the morning, just before the sun was up for these trips, and since we were driving in separate vehicles, my dad and my uncle sprung for a pair of two-way radios so we could communicate with one another on the way down. This was still the time before GPS and MapQuest, and cell phones were just beginning to become common to have, so we were using Triple-A’s TripTickets. I remember the road map having a big streak of yellow highlighter tracing the routes from Indy all the way to the Atlantic coast. (more…)

I mentioned in my last post that after we left Niagara Falls, New York, we were heading to Ohio to finish out our vacation. As you can see from the title, the trip was practically made for me, with all of my interests (except maybe the Ninja Turtles) being explored. We went to Sea World and the National Museum of the USAF while we were there, but before I talk about those adventures, I have to talk about the hotel we stayed in.

We were staying in a Holiday Inn, but this wasn’t one of the typical-but-functional rooms you think of at chain hotels; we were staying at the Holidome. If you’ve never stayed in one, the rooms are built in a circular fashion and face an indoor pool/exercise area/arcade/picnic area.  Now, I’ve been around enough to know that many of these things are fairly common now, but to my young mind at the time this was the pinnacle of luxury (read: the coolest thing ever). We spent at least an hour of every day there at the heated pool, or in the very shallow kiddie pool. I remember I had lost a tooth at some point during the trip, and had a grand time pretending to be a whale, shooting water out of the gap in my front teeth.

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Sometime during my elementary school years, we went on a mega vacation that had us driving in our gray station wagon all the way out to Niagara Falls, New York for the first leg, and then on the return trip we would be staying in the Dayton/Columbus area of Ohio. This post will be dedicated to the the first leg of the trip, with the second part coming in the next entry. I forget when exactly this trip occurred, but it’s still one of my favorite and earliest memories of bonding with my family. This trip may have even predated the Florida trip I mentioned in my last post, as I remember watching some of the video dad took of the trip with my two sisters and I jamming in the car to Bobby Brown’s “Every Little Step.” (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…)

Source: WikiPedia

One of my life goals is to stay a night in each of the 50 states. Being a former member of Purdue University’s football equipment staff, I had the opportunity to do a lot of traveling, and I’ve stayed in about 15 States so far. I will admit that a handful of States I have stayed in were more like “layover nights” than proper visits, and I will probably be going back to them (I hope) in my lifetime to get a fuller experience there. I will write at least one post  for each of the States I’ve been to so far, with the exception of Indiana, since I’ve spent practically my entire life there. After the break, I’ll have a list of all of the places I’ve been, and will probably set up a “check list” page for the States in the near future. (more…)