Captain_Oblivious
DIS Dad #257, Galactic Salad Dodger
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2008
- Messages
- 13,440
Chapter 1: Come Out to the Coast, We’ll Get Together, Have a Few Laughs
Greetings and welcome to yet another Captain_Oblivious trip report. My name is Mark, I live in Delaware, and over the last several years I’ve been chronicling my family’s attempt to visit all 50 states in the U.S. (with occasional breaks for Disney parks). If you’ve read one of my trip reports before, then you pretty much know the drill. There will be lots of digressions just to set up terrible jokes. There will be obscure movie references. And there will be plenty of photos of scenery and family members who are far better-looking than I am (see above photo). If you haven’t read one of my trip reports before, then…where have you been? And what are you doing here?
No, seriously--please respond. It's a lot more fun and a lot less embarrassing when you're writing a trip report if people actually respond. Don't ask me how I know.
We’ve now entered a new phase in terms of our family vacations. It’s the station of life where our kids have now become or are becoming adults with their own priorities, schedules, and lives that are now separate from our own. I believe the technical term for this is the “Holy crap, I’m old!” stage.
We finished our family’s 50-state quest in 2021, just after my oldest, Sarah, had started attending college in Philadelphia. Naturally, we weren’t just going to stop traveling after that, but we needed to come up with some new ideas for travel destinations. (You might say we needed a new gimmick.) In an ideal world, we would have loved to start traveling overseas now that we had seen much of what our own country has to offer.
But have you looked out the window lately? We don’t live in an ideal world. My son, David, was just graduating from high school this past June, which meant we would now have two kids in college. My wife, Julie, and I fall into that large middle-class bracket that is both too rich to get any meaningful financial aid but too poor to actually be able to afford college payments. We filled out all the required financial aid forms and said, "Please give us some help. Your school is ridiculously expensive, and we don't have any extra money lying around." And the schools came back by saying, "Nonsense. Look at all this cash you're wasting every month on something called a 'mortgage'. Request denied."
So that rules out international travel for the time being. Especially with another son, Scott, set to hit college in a couple of years.
To make a long story short, we decided to give David one last hurrah in summer 2022 by tailoring a trip around many of the things he loves: National Parks, the outdoors, Disney Parks, and sports. With those interests in mind, we looked over the map of our travels to see if we could combine those items with some areas that we had either not explored or passed through in a hurry. One idea led to another, and we ended up planning a trip to Southern California.
We had briefly visited Southern California back in 2014, while we were touring the American Southwest. At that time, our youngest, Andrew, was a toddler just a few months old, and we were busy exploring natural landmarks such as the Grand Canyon. But a wonderful DISboard friend, Alison (@franandaj), had arranged for some pixie dust for us and so we added a couple of days in California to our itinerary for the express purpose of taking the kids to Disneyland.
It was totally worth it. 10/10, would recommend.
But we’d definitely left some meat on the bone as far as exploring Los Angeles, San Diego, and the rest of the region. Could we find enough to do there in order to justify a full vacation? In short: yes, yes we could.
Remember what I said about our kid having their own schedules, though? The logistics were going to be the hard part.
One of the things that attracted Sarah to her current school is the fact that they incorporate a co-op (or internship) period as part of their curriculum. So for 6 months during their junior year, they get to work and gain actual job experience in their field of study. Job experience in college? Awesome, right? But in order to accomplish this, the school is on a quarters system instead of the usual fall and spring semesters. They’re still trying to squeeze the same number of classes into 4 years in order to be able to complete a college degree in that time. So that means that sophomores spend the entire year taking classes—including during the summer between their sophomore and junior years. This just so happens to have been where Sarah was in her educational timeline.
That meant she had exactly one week of summer vacation this year: from June 11 to June 18.
Great, that makes planning easy. We’ll just take our vacation then.
Ha! As if life would ever make anything convenient for us. My wife, Julie, is a 4th grade teacher. Her last day of class was scheduled to be June 15 (this was also to be Scott and Andrew’s last day of school). She was also required to be in school the next two days in order to finalize grades, set up class lists for the next year, and pack up her classroom. Apparently the school frowns upon teachers taking days off while kids are in school for some reason.
Less understandable is the way they frown upon teachers taking off for those “pack up the classroom” days. I mean, why do they give teachers “personal days” if they’re not allowed to use them? And why is the principal happy to take multiple vacations during the school year? I hate people.
Sorry, I’m digressing already. Don’t worry, I just hate other people. Not you.
I’m the trip planner for our family. By the time we take off on a vacation, I will have almost every minute of the itinerary nailed down. I’ll book the flights, the rental car, the hotels, pay for admission to the attractions, and I’ll almost always know exactly where we are having our meals (and will have made reservations), will have booked necessary tours, and will usually even know where we can stock up on snacks for the car and re-fuel the rental car.
But this was a logistics dilemma I hadn’t faced before. If we went on vacation when Sarah was available, then Julie would miss out. If we waited for Julie to be available, then Sarah wouldn’t get to travel at all this year.
In the end, we figured out a compromise that worked as well as we could hope for…if a bit complicated. I would fly out on Wednesday, June 15 with the big kids. I’d get the rental car and stock up on our food supplies for the road trip over the next couple days, and then somehow we would entertain ourselves until Julie and Andrew flew out on the evening of June 16. I would then pick them up from the airport and we would have a great 2 days of fun together as a family before I took Sarah back to the airport on Sunday the 19th so she could get back to Philadelphia to start classes again while the rest of us continued on the adventure. This plan was deemed acceptable by Julie as long as we didn’t do anything on the 15th or 16th that she deemed “fun” or “enjoyable” and would make her feel like she missed out on something.
Got all that? The itinerary for this one basically looked like Russell Crowe’s shed in A Beautiful Mind.
The things you do for family.
What would we do first? Well…this, my friends, is what is known as a tease. I hope you'll join in and read along!
Coming Up Next: Find out what we did first! We’ll try and answer the age-old question: How do I have fun in California, but not too much fun so I don't have to sleep on the couch? I've never tried to plan a mediocre vacation day before.
Greetings and welcome to yet another Captain_Oblivious trip report. My name is Mark, I live in Delaware, and over the last several years I’ve been chronicling my family’s attempt to visit all 50 states in the U.S. (with occasional breaks for Disney parks). If you’ve read one of my trip reports before, then you pretty much know the drill. There will be lots of digressions just to set up terrible jokes. There will be obscure movie references. And there will be plenty of photos of scenery and family members who are far better-looking than I am (see above photo). If you haven’t read one of my trip reports before, then…where have you been? And what are you doing here?
No, seriously--please respond. It's a lot more fun and a lot less embarrassing when you're writing a trip report if people actually respond. Don't ask me how I know.
We’ve now entered a new phase in terms of our family vacations. It’s the station of life where our kids have now become or are becoming adults with their own priorities, schedules, and lives that are now separate from our own. I believe the technical term for this is the “Holy crap, I’m old!” stage.
We finished our family’s 50-state quest in 2021, just after my oldest, Sarah, had started attending college in Philadelphia. Naturally, we weren’t just going to stop traveling after that, but we needed to come up with some new ideas for travel destinations. (You might say we needed a new gimmick.) In an ideal world, we would have loved to start traveling overseas now that we had seen much of what our own country has to offer.
But have you looked out the window lately? We don’t live in an ideal world. My son, David, was just graduating from high school this past June, which meant we would now have two kids in college. My wife, Julie, and I fall into that large middle-class bracket that is both too rich to get any meaningful financial aid but too poor to actually be able to afford college payments. We filled out all the required financial aid forms and said, "Please give us some help. Your school is ridiculously expensive, and we don't have any extra money lying around." And the schools came back by saying, "Nonsense. Look at all this cash you're wasting every month on something called a 'mortgage'. Request denied."
So that rules out international travel for the time being. Especially with another son, Scott, set to hit college in a couple of years.
To make a long story short, we decided to give David one last hurrah in summer 2022 by tailoring a trip around many of the things he loves: National Parks, the outdoors, Disney Parks, and sports. With those interests in mind, we looked over the map of our travels to see if we could combine those items with some areas that we had either not explored or passed through in a hurry. One idea led to another, and we ended up planning a trip to Southern California.
We had briefly visited Southern California back in 2014, while we were touring the American Southwest. At that time, our youngest, Andrew, was a toddler just a few months old, and we were busy exploring natural landmarks such as the Grand Canyon. But a wonderful DISboard friend, Alison (@franandaj), had arranged for some pixie dust for us and so we added a couple of days in California to our itinerary for the express purpose of taking the kids to Disneyland.
It was totally worth it. 10/10, would recommend.
But we’d definitely left some meat on the bone as far as exploring Los Angeles, San Diego, and the rest of the region. Could we find enough to do there in order to justify a full vacation? In short: yes, yes we could.
Remember what I said about our kid having their own schedules, though? The logistics were going to be the hard part.
One of the things that attracted Sarah to her current school is the fact that they incorporate a co-op (or internship) period as part of their curriculum. So for 6 months during their junior year, they get to work and gain actual job experience in their field of study. Job experience in college? Awesome, right? But in order to accomplish this, the school is on a quarters system instead of the usual fall and spring semesters. They’re still trying to squeeze the same number of classes into 4 years in order to be able to complete a college degree in that time. So that means that sophomores spend the entire year taking classes—including during the summer between their sophomore and junior years. This just so happens to have been where Sarah was in her educational timeline.
That meant she had exactly one week of summer vacation this year: from June 11 to June 18.
Great, that makes planning easy. We’ll just take our vacation then.
Ha! As if life would ever make anything convenient for us. My wife, Julie, is a 4th grade teacher. Her last day of class was scheduled to be June 15 (this was also to be Scott and Andrew’s last day of school). She was also required to be in school the next two days in order to finalize grades, set up class lists for the next year, and pack up her classroom. Apparently the school frowns upon teachers taking days off while kids are in school for some reason.
Less understandable is the way they frown upon teachers taking off for those “pack up the classroom” days. I mean, why do they give teachers “personal days” if they’re not allowed to use them? And why is the principal happy to take multiple vacations during the school year? I hate people.
Sorry, I’m digressing already. Don’t worry, I just hate other people. Not you.
I’m the trip planner for our family. By the time we take off on a vacation, I will have almost every minute of the itinerary nailed down. I’ll book the flights, the rental car, the hotels, pay for admission to the attractions, and I’ll almost always know exactly where we are having our meals (and will have made reservations), will have booked necessary tours, and will usually even know where we can stock up on snacks for the car and re-fuel the rental car.
But this was a logistics dilemma I hadn’t faced before. If we went on vacation when Sarah was available, then Julie would miss out. If we waited for Julie to be available, then Sarah wouldn’t get to travel at all this year.
In the end, we figured out a compromise that worked as well as we could hope for…if a bit complicated. I would fly out on Wednesday, June 15 with the big kids. I’d get the rental car and stock up on our food supplies for the road trip over the next couple days, and then somehow we would entertain ourselves until Julie and Andrew flew out on the evening of June 16. I would then pick them up from the airport and we would have a great 2 days of fun together as a family before I took Sarah back to the airport on Sunday the 19th so she could get back to Philadelphia to start classes again while the rest of us continued on the adventure. This plan was deemed acceptable by Julie as long as we didn’t do anything on the 15th or 16th that she deemed “fun” or “enjoyable” and would make her feel like she missed out on something.
Got all that? The itinerary for this one basically looked like Russell Crowe’s shed in A Beautiful Mind.
The things you do for family.
What would we do first? Well…this, my friends, is what is known as a tease. I hope you'll join in and read along!
Coming Up Next: Find out what we did first! We’ll try and answer the age-old question: How do I have fun in California, but not too much fun so I don't have to sleep on the couch? I've never tried to plan a mediocre vacation day before.
Alison! Glad this was easy for you to find. 
