I Need....Well I WANT a Vacation

I grew up taking vacations with my parents.  Our normal summer routine was to head to Homer, Alaska and fish for halibut.  We did that as often as 2-3 times a summer if we could.  I loved it and have such fond memories of being out on the water all day long deep sea fishing, combing the beaches for shells, lots of seafood eating, always hanging out around the campfire with our friends.  So awesome!!

There is just something about sleeping away from home that makes it seem like a vacation.  Now, I do sleep better when I'm at home, but I love the act of vacationing!!
Since all our kids have come to us through adoption and birth we have not really had a vacation.  We have been to Greece twice for meeting with our colleagues, but we attend meetings all day so it's not like a vacation where you can sit by the pool in the sun all day.  We did have some free afternoons, but still not the same.

Our last vacation was as a couple to the west coast of Ireland to see the Cliffs of Moher in August 2005.  We left on our 11th anniversary, August 6.  Such an awesome memory making vacation!!  Walking the cliffs and enjoying the lazy fishing towns.  It was just weeks before receiving the news of our adoption and successful IVF!!

While we were in Texas in 2008 I decided that we were going to take our first family vacation to the Texas coast to a little beach strip town called Crystal Beach just to the east of Galveston.  I planned for a couple of months and hit the low season in September to get a better price and miss the crowds, but still have the warmth.  I searched for just the perfect beach house right on the beach.  I found 2 with a good price and that I liked and finally settled on one.  I was going to take a crock pot so we could do easy meals and go out a couple of nights to a local restaurant.  We were just going to play in the little yard in front or in the sandy beach right over the fenced in yard.  Nothing but relax!! 

Wouldn't you know that THREE DAYS before we were to leave for our family vacation Hurricane Ike stepped up and literally destroyed this little town.  It was sad and I was devastated.  I was saddened for this little community as well as feeling a little selfish that our vacation was ruined.  Jerry didn't want the pressure of coming up with an alternative, so he decided to still take the week off and we would do some activities around the metroplex.  We did some fun things like a trip on the mini train in Fort Worth, went to the zoo on our passes, went to Glen Rose with my parents and drove through Fossil Rim, a drive through zoo where you can feed the animals, visited the Fort Worth botanical gardens.  You know what though, it didn't feel like a vacation to me.

Now we are about to hit the one year mark of our return to Prague and have 3 weeks of vacation to use!  We had talked about going to Madrid to visit some preschools that our colleagues have looked at, but the cost for 5 of us to fly is a little on the expensive side.  We could do it, but we can think of several other ways we could use that money.  We also considered visiting some colleagues in Germany and hitting some spots around the country, but Jerry isn't excited to do that either.  His thought was to, again, do some things near home.  However, he has a good point this time.  The kids are now old enough to have memories that might possibly stay with them.  We are now in our last few months of living in the Czech Republic.  Why don't we use that time to see some of the sites around the country and create memories of their early years here.  How can I argue with that one?!
So, I guess I should get busy and figure out what some of those memory creating sites/activities/things should be!!  This country is full of them!