Gender Vacations

Family vacations are a very funny experience in our household. Travel is Marisa's thing...always has been. She books all our vacations from beginning to end with no help and very little input from me. Which is perfect. She loves the little details, I can't stand them. She loves searching out the bargains, I would just click on the first available option (I'm very much a "Buy It Now" kind of guy). It works this way for the trips we take together as a family, as well as the trips we take alone without the kids. 

There are some....um, what can we say? Maybe...."pitfalls" to this approach? That's probably accurate. By not getting involved, I'm pretty much guaranteed trips that involve; coffee shops, quaint little "downtowns", walks (which aren't walks as much as shopping), art galleries (which I really don't get. We have no "art"), high end clothing stores, discussions about sweaters and how"cute" they are, scones, pastries, loaves of bread, cheese, produce, arts and crafts etc. No so much a trip as a Meg Ryan movie. 

I accept it, it's the cost I pay for not being involved. To be perfectly honest, it makes me smile to see her just itching to go as soon as we see a row of shops and a sidewalk somewhere. I just love the grand romantic scenes that I imagine are flying thru her head as she is walking with the coffee from the hippy coffee shop and her pastry/crusty bread/fruit/cheese etc. She is just waiting for the birds to start singing to her in English and a big eyed doe to wander out onto the sidewalk and lick her hand, while violin music swells in the background. 

The other issue with vacation planning is that she does it months in advance (for the bargains), so she has months to play the, "you know what we should do when we get to X?" game. She reads books and does tons of internet research for months. This invariably leads to some overblown and thus unattainable expectations being built up. Her romantic notions sometimes can't hold up to the children being along. She has to reconcile her dreams of candlelight dinners at the local sustainable cuisine bistro, with Jake and Tanner wanting Dos Locos Tacos from Taco Bell for dinner. Her dreams of strolling along the cobblestone are often times dashed by Faith's whining that it's "TOO FAR" and "MY LEGS HURT". 

There is really no middle ground between us either. She thinks the kids will enhance and be enriched by her rom-com dream trip, and I know it's going to be crappy food, endless shopping for stuffed animals and a Buddhist monk-level exercise in patience that I can just never manage (no matter how hard I try - and I really do try). The trips (at least with the kids) always end up somewhere in the middle and I end up needing a vacation from our vacation.

This trip has kind of been an evolution of this dichotomy. Jake is old enough that we can leave him in charge of the little kids for short periods so we can go walk (again SHOP) and get some alone time. This trip we also have fed the kids separately (at Taco Bell) and then we went to the downtown fish market/restaurant and had fresh seafood while they sat there and played video games. 

I was joking with her this morning about it, as we walked to the cappuccino/mocha/latte store/bakery. That I always end up following along while she lives out her rom-com fantasy, holding her purse while she shops, and giving my opinions on art that we will never in a million years purchase. I wondered aloud what her response would be if I wanted to go to the "fly fishing/electronics convention" followed by a college football game? Just like the tootsie roll owl discovers; the world may never know.