It’s Not the Destination, But the Journey

Planning a Memorable Spring Break Trip

 article by Cindy G. Foust

Greetings BayouLife nation, on what is now the second month of 2019…and before you know it, we will be dragging the Christmas boxes back out of the attic and Black Friday shopping all over again.

But alas, it’s still just February so I think I’ll just try to soak up some of this winter precipitation we’ve been having and continue drinking my hot chocolate. Wait, who am I kidding? The only precipitation we’ve had is…well, we haven’t had any so there’s that.

How about we back up and start over, readers while I try to decide what to write my column about this month. I was thinking I’d write my very first “how-to” column and give a tutorial on “how-to” organize your pet supplies. After all, February 20th is Love Your Pet Day, and I thought that would make for a fascinating read. But, the only pet supplies we have at our house are puppy pads and dog food, so I’m trying to figure out how in the cat hair I’m supposed to organize those. But hey, if you are my best friend, Linda Lou, you might have to think about adding an “annex” to your garage to house all your dog toys. It’s true readers, her dogs got Christmas presents before her kids did, so there’s that, too.

So, with no help in the pet supply organizing department, I thought about just giving an update on my very own pet, Annie Lou Foust. After all, she is the smartest dog in all of the world and probably should be at Harvard for dogs, but doesn’t everyone think that about their pets, so yeah, a pet update on my Malti-poo is a no-go, as well.

Then I got to thinking about how next month is spring break and wondering where I might take my kids on a little mini-vacation (sadly, this is just how my brain swings from one random idea to the next). We’ve never gotten to have a spring break vacay that didn’t revolve around sports, so I got to thinking about where I might like to surprise my kids and go. Any ideas? I’m not the one to ask, really, because I have kind of bad luck on vacations.

Bad luck might very well be an understatement. One time, I went on a church trip to these cabins in the woods in Arkansas, like out in the middle of nowhere, where Jason and Michael Myers live, and I accidentally dove in the shallow end of the pool and scraped all my hair off, like to the middle of my head. It was rather unfortunate looking, to say the least.

Then another time, I signed up for a mission trip to Big Piney, Wyoming to teach Vacation Bible School. It seemed like a good idea at the time, all we had to do was take classes and train for six months before we left…well, we actually departed the church in a big motorhome, like the kind you drive, pulling a travel trailer. Before we got to Bossier, the travel trailer blew a tire or broke an axle or had some malfunction that couldn’t be fixed so we had to leave it on the side of the road. While we were gone to get help, it got vandalized.

Honestly, that should have been our “sign” to TURN AROUND AND GO HOME but no, we continued on our way and the minute we pulled in the parking lot of the church we were teaching VBS at, some lady, whose identity I will try and protect, was chasing these two little boys around in the front yard of the church with a fly swatter. And let me tell you, when she caught them, she tore their tail up DELUXE. Not sure what they did to get their tails torn up like that, but I’m willing to bet they didn’t do it again.

GET IN YOUR MOTORHOME AND GO HOME should have been our next idea, but no, we were trained VBS professionals so we were ready and waiting the next morning for our little children to teach the gospel to. Lo and behold, only three kids showed up… and two of them were the preacher’s kids. Might have been the same two running for their lives the day before, if memory serves me best. So technically, only one kid showed up. One. CALL YOUR PARENTS FOR A PLANE TICKET.

That same night we went to the movies, Conan the Barbarian, and do any of you remember that movie? The opening scene is a little “unsuitable” for younger viewers (we were in high school really, but on a church trip nonetheless) and right about the time the inappropriate scene started, (while my youth pastor was hyperventilating and trying to get us ushered out of the theater due to the nature of the movie), a wind storm, like the kind that spins sand through the air and causes you to have zero visibility, and quite possibly blew Dorothy and Toto right out of Kansas, blew through Big Piney and knocked the power lines down (all two of them, since the population was like 578) and we had to sit in the theater in the pitch black and finally be ushered to our motorhome by this elderly gentleman with a flashlight the size of a Buick. Man, did we ever think the Lord was coming back, right as we sat in the movie theater watching a racy movie on a church trip. FUN TIMES.

So, I’m probably not the go-to person for trip advice, although I do love to travel. And I have passed that gene down to both my children, because they like to travel as well, which brings me back to my original column topic, which is, where to go for spring break?

You know readers, it doesn’t have to be Disney World to be a memorable family vacation (you could rent a motorhome and take your family to Big Piney, Wyoming, population now 551, a drop I am sure that was caused by the great wind storm of 1982.)

It could just be renting a cabin at Caney Lake or even a small cabin in the woods of Arkansas. The beach is also a good idea this time of year, if you like icicles hanging from your nose and rain…lots of rain this time of year.

The point is this readers, traveling as a family, no matter what your budget or your idea of fun is, is some of the best ways to make memories with your children. I can tell you this, my parents weren’t on the Big Piney trip with me (my youth pastor and his wife were and they are still like my parents), but it was memorable to say the least.

Did I forget to tell you about the pit bull that got after me and chased me over a fence when I was trying to be a missionary and tape VBS invitation cards to people’s front doors? I still walk funny to this day, but it was memorable.

Traveling is yet another way to pull your little family in tighter and especially when your kids or grandkids, are small, even if you just head over to the Great Wolf Lodge for a long weekend. I did a waterpark one time, too, and after I shot out of one of those big tubes going 100 miles an hour and hit the water, my swimsuit bottoms shot off my body like a slingshot and I had to wait on someone to bring me a towel. I’ve got witnesses, whose names I will also protect, to back me up on this one.Thank God they didn’t have camera phones then or I might not be able to run for public office. I guess the bottoms got hung in a drain, but dear Lord, I had a way of making church trips memorable.

So what says you, readers? What cool trips are you planning for spring break or even a little further down the road, for summer vacation? Remember, it’s not the destination, but the journey you took to get there (this sounds like something Robert Frost would have written, but I get to take full credit).

Take the time and plan a little get-away, even make it a surprise for your kids, and get busy making memories that your children will be writing about in their columns one day. Spending time together is what you should strive for and I encourage you to carve out a week and head cross country to Wally World with your crew. Just don’t forget to stop and see the world’s largest ball of yarn, while you are at it.