“Family Vacation”
As I figure it, a trip has to either have a reasonable expectation of being relaxing, or be exciting in some way, in order to count as a vacation. (Preferably with elements of both, but let’s not be picky.) Not that I don’t love my family, but we don’t do particularly well together in confined spaces for extended periods of time, so on the whole, it isn’t exactly tranquil.
As for exciting, they once again chose New Jersey as the site of our mostly-yearly temporary migration, so that was pretty unlikely too. Not that I have anything against New Jersey either, but I’m not a beach person and boardwalks have long since lost their novelty, so going “down the shore” (when there are so many places we haven’t seen yet, and several we’re always saying we should go back to, yet never quite manage to) is just kind of lame.
Not very relaxing, not very exciting… it’s not so much “vacation” as “let’s move to New Jersey, and then move back home a week later!” :/ Oxymoron. But I got my exciting vacations in already with the NASAtweetup trips, and at least we’re staying in a different town than usual (Cape May instead of Ocean City), so I’m not fighting them on it this year.
My dad did end up discovering a couple actually-fun things for us to do this time! Both involving airplanes. The first being the NAS Wildwood Aviation Museum, so while my mom and the sistercreature went to the beach again, we went to check it out!
As you can kind of see there, the hangar is just crammed with planes and helicopters and other really interesting exhibits, including “All Available Boats” (about 9-11 rescue ops), a whole area about the Coast Guard, and a ton of historical stuff from WWII, when it was an active Naval air combat training station. Very neat stuff! And I got a hat.
The next day, it turned out, was the Atlantic City Airshow, “Thunder Over the Boardwalk” featuring the USAF Thunderbirds! Not that Cape May is all that close to Atlantic City, but we figured it was worth a little drive.
And oh, it was! I got so many pictures. And almost all of them are awesome. Narrowing it down to a reasonable number to post was quite the challenge.
So much flying awesome. 🙂
Also, Cara and Quinn came down to hang for a few days!
Well, I still wouldn’t call it “relaxing”, but this family vacation definitely had more of my sort of fun in the mix than usual. And by “my sort of fun,” I mean airplanes and books. Got lots of reading done too.
The parents weren’t planning on coming home until Sunday night, and I’m driving out to Harrisburg on Monday for Jessss’s wedding (and need to do laundry sometime before then), so when my Grandma and Aunt Carol came down to join us at the beach for the day on Thursday, I decided to hitch a ride home with them. So now I have the house aaaaaaaaallll to myself for a few days!