Our family is in Utah today and we’re going to Lagoon, a big amusement park that is here.
We’ve been debating for three or four days which rides everyone will go on. My second son and I are going to try to hit the most extreme, scary, thrill-seeking rides. My wife and daughter will generally be taking it much easier, though Liberty might push her mom’s limits a bit.
And then there is Levi, our third son. He’s old enough to go on all the rides, but still nervous about the craziest ones. It will be my personal challenge to stretch him a bit beyond his comfort zone.
In essence, we’ve been doing some casual vacation planning.
Vacation planning is what you do before the vacation.
Planning on vacation is what you do during the vacation.
If you do good vacation planning in advance your planning on vacation is easy, takes less time than usual, and is more about adaptation and confirmation.
That said, planning on vacation will turn up problems in your vacation plans.
It’s when you actually think through a day of vacation in enough detail that you realize you forgot something, or need to prepare a bit more, or don’t have some questions answered that you never thought to ask.
Yesterday, we went to the Museum of Natural Curiosity at Thanksgiving Point. Turns out, it’s pretty boring. So, after wasting too much money, but not much time, we needed to change plans. Kami and I did a little pow-wow planning session, considered our options, and came up with some alternatives. We ran them by the kids, chose one, and salvaged the day.
It wasn’t what we wanted to do originally, but it turned out reasonably well in the end.