Growing up, we didn’t take many extravagant or fancy vacations. For the most part, our vacations consisted of packing up a giant white cooler, mountain bikes, and an assortment of camping gear into the back of my Dad’s Ford F-350 Super Duty diesel pickup truck and hitting the road. More often than not, we just went to a nearby campground. Other times we hoofed it out to a far-away National Park, and occasionally we just pitched our tents in random areas that happened to be at the end of unfamiliar dirt roads.
I grew up with the mindset that vacations didn’t need to look like the thing that people talk about after returning tanned from Cabo San Lucas. Vacations as I understood them were primarily about coming together as a family, getting away from the noise and clutter of life, and providing an opportunity to experience the physical world.