Trying to plan a family vacation is like herding cats. Or herding fleas. Or herding Smiths and Keiths.
I don’t know why I thought it would be anything else.
My side of the family — my parents; my brother and his wife and their two boys; my older son, DIL and baby daughter; my younger son; and my husband and I — will be going. We started talking about a summer trip many months ago.
My sister-in-law is the great trip planner because she’s been on so many. (She helped coordinate a family vacation on her side of the family last summer.) In September, she mentioned we should go ahead and find a place to stay for our upcoming vacation, but we didn’t.
At Christmas, she suggested we take time out of the weekend celebration to plan, but we didn’t.
Before we knew it, we were all back home and busy with our lives, work, the flu and such.
We had all agreed that we wanted to go Florida. To me, the best vacation involves a beach. Just hearing the ocean waves and feeling the warm breeze are relaxing and take away my stress for a few days.
I really need a vacation after helping to plan this one.
Finally, we started searching in earnest for a place to stay. Instead of being in the same room to do this planning, though, we were in two cities — even two states, if you count my younger son.
We had different ideas — some of us wanted a house; others wanted separate condo units. Being right on the beach was preferable, until we started pricing houses on the beach — if we could even find one to fit our needs. We needed five bedrooms, at least, and the more bathrooms the better.
The group texting commenced.
We had to download an app to view some of the properties. I was trying to look at them and work, which made me crazy. Sometimes there was only one possible week left, and that threw me into a panic every time. I texted my sister-in-law at 4 a.m. one day when I woke up with a question about a potential place.
My older son, who makes my frugal husband look lavish, suggested he could stay at a cheap hotel with points he’s earned traveling for his job.
My husband suggested he’d just sleep in our Highlander.
We were about to leave them both at home.
My sister-in-law thought she’d found the perfect place. It was gorgeous; it looked like something featured in Southern Living magazine. It wasn’t on the beach, but it was really close.
We counted bedrooms. We counted bathrooms. Then we realized that one “bedroom” was a big open room with a kitchen and a couch that made a bed, plus a queen-size Murphy bed, hidden in the photo behind a curtain on the wall.
The Murphy bed was our undoing. Who was going to sleep in the Murphy bed? Who didn’t care if they had no privacy? No one wanted to claim it, except my husband. So we agreed to sleep in it, and our younger son could take the couch. I did not relish the idea of my night-owl, loud younger son in the same room, but sometimes sacrifices have to be made.
My sister-in-law said no dice. The search continued.
She found another seemingly perfect place, but when she went to book it, another $3,000 in fees miraculously appeared.
I suggested the tried-and-true condo where my husband and I love to stay. Two loft units, side by side, were available
the week we wanted. On the beach. There were plenty of beds, plenty of bathrooms. Book it.
And for anyone who doesn’t like it, there’s always a cheap hotel or the Highlander.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.