Dadcation
For a dozen years, we’ve gone as a family to Saint Simons Island when I have my annual workers’ comp legal seminar (which is either on SSI or neighboring Jekyll), but this year, the children had too many conflicts at school or that weekend, so I went alone. Hopefully, we’ll go down as a family and get one last “on the dog” photo of the 3 children together before the oldest moves out and moves on. We did, however, return to the Bahamas to Baha Mar for a…
Even though the boy threatens to make this our last year to have a family-themed costume each of the past recent years, we’ve fended off such desires another year–this is Year Eight of such tomfoolery! Happy Halloween.
When an organization whose Board you’re on schedules its annual conference in Las Vegas, you sign up for the tax-deductible vacation. When you find out an artist you’ve loved for 35+ years has a very rare live performance at the same time, you go early and make it a weekend to remember for life. So, that’s what I did right before Halloween 2018. We landed late Friday night and checked in at the Four Seasons at Mandalay Bay. Saturday morning, we rented a car at the onsite Avis…
For this year’s Halloween costume, we traveled to Hill Valley, California in November 1955.
The 8-year-old started reading the “Harry Potter” books a few months ago; she’s finishing the last installment in the 30-45 minutes of extra awake time we give her after bath time. Naturally, she wanted to dress like Hermione for Halloween this year. So, we let her. But what about the rest of us? Her two younger siblings were not all that excited about dressing like characters from a book and movie they knew nothing about. “There’s a cat in the book.” “A cat?” “Yes! Hermione has a cat…
In October, I had 5 work-related trips that we did our best to turn into fun. One was to Portland, Maine, so I hit my 43rd U.S. National Park–Acadia ! We started in Myrtle Beach, flew to Phoenix, then drove to Jekyll Island, GA, and then flew to Baha Mar in the Bahamas before flying to Maine. In between, we saw Smashing Pumpkins with Jane’s Addiction and Death Cab for Cutie concerts, and I participated in my first group ride with the American Legion Riders, which was awesome….
October featured our 10th “high on the dog” photo of the children at Gnat’s Landing at Saint Simons Island, some shooting, some fishing, some biking, some fine dining, and our 10th consecutive coordinated family Halloween costume.
Shortly after the lockdown started, we began watching movies in the evenings, and sometimes they were movies I enjoyed 20+ years ago that I couldn’t quite recall whether they’d be appropriate for children or not, but we watched them regardless, and one of those may very well have been “The Matrix,” but you know what? It made for a decidedly appropriate 2020 family Halloween costume, our 9th consecutive such undertaking: We all know Neo took the red pill in 1999, opted to stay in Wonderland, and saw how…
I haven’t flown on a non-Delta aircraft in over a decade, but when a travel newsletter I get said American had round-trip flights to Chicago for $49 a few months ago, I bought 5 for the weekend of Sept. 11. Why that date and that city? In 1997, I graduated from Alabama and moved to Atlanta to begin working at IBM. I didn’t have any friends in Atlanta, so when a guy named Jesse showed up at my hotel room during an out of town training class and…
I love October. We get dropping temperatures (most years), a trip to Saint Simons Island for my annual conference, and Halloween. Some years, we take an additional work-related trip, but this year, the military interfered with that plan. This year, we took our newish electric car to SSI. It took longer, but we enjoyed our charging stops along the way in Macon and Savannah. Just before we left, I slapped on a license plate from 1985 and took what may be my favorite picture ever: Once we arrived,…