lindalove

My trip to Sitka, Alaska the summer between eighth and ninth grade. Best two weeks of my life.

Carno

I took a trip to Nicaragua in the summer of 2004 for just about a month. Best money/time I ever spent. Met some really cool people and got to see a whole different culture and style of living. Plus I got to see a lot of the Nicaraguan countryside, which was very beautiful. It was just an amazing trip. It really was an adventure for me. I went there with a guy I had just met, and neither of us spoke Spanish.

A couple of funny/scary moments involved being on a ferry that almost sank in the middle of a lake, being on an outboard fishing boat that almost sank in the ocean, talking our way onto property that was guarded by armed men, getting almost beaten up by a local who had too much to drink, getting searched and interrogated at a military checkpoint and one time when I thought I was going to get beaten up by a bouncer, but he really only wanted my two glass beer bottles.

__________________
http://how-to-spell-ridiculous.com/

Rodney

It was a trip to New England 20 years or so ago. I'd never been, and the trip was like an intensive crash course on New England culture. I saw part of it with an old bud who'd moved there, and who put me up with his fiance's family on their farm out in the middle of nowhere. I saw part of it with a rowdy group of sci-fi and fantasy fans, ending up with a crazed, weekend-long party at a fantasy con in New Haven. In between, I stayed in a small New Hampshire town where anybody who's family had been there less than 200 years was trash; saw the fall colors everywhere; met all the sterotypical New England small town characters (it's _all true_); literally wandered into a Teddy Kennedy rally in Faneuil Hall in Boston, where I sat with the national press, and ended up shaking Walter Mondale's hand, for what that's worth; I help cook for one of my hosts the first Chinese food he'd ever eaten in his life (he didn't get out much); climbed a mountain in New Hampshire and hiked through the prettiest countryside you're ever going to see; saw better museums than we've ever had in California; found out how to relate to Northeasterners (ie, people who'll tell you exactly what they think, even if you don't want to know), fought mad crowds at Filene's basement and carried off a $25 bomber jacket, was nearly run down two or three times in Boston until I figured out that there are no rules on the streets there; was literally chased by the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in North Station (he wanted to shake my hand; I wanted to get away); interviewed fantasy authors on videotape at the New Haven con; enjoyed brilliant pizza and fresh seafood all over the place. And caught my ride to the airport in a shuttle full of 18-year-old Navy recruits on their way to basic. All that in about ten days. I've traveled far since then, but never enjoyed myself more.

genuinegirly

Month in Europe with Turbotom. A backpack, a couple changes of clothes, and a train pass.
Many happy memories.

Yeah.

__________________
"Sometimes I have to remember that things are brought to me for a reason, either for my own lessons or for the benefit of others." Cynthetiq

"violence is no more or less real than non-violence." roachboy

la petite moi

Living in France for three months. SO amazing. It made me realise my passion for languages and different cultures. It changed my life, as well.

analog

Two weeks in Holland. We drank and partied all night like each night was our last night on the planet. Absolutely incredible.

splck

Backpacking around Europe for six months when I was 21 was one of the best vacations I've ever had.

__________________
nice line eh?

Xazy

My honeymoon, in Eilat. It was 90 degrees 0 huminity. Perfect weather, the entire time, great beach, dolphins coming up to you.. So mucht to say about the trip, but it was just gorgeous and perfect.

Toaster126

During the 1999-2000 Christmas break I went to Cancún (Mexico) for New Years. The beaches were amazing, and I had a blast seeing the ocean for the first time and just relaxing.

While on vacation, I went sightseeing at Chichén-Itzá. That is a site of Mayan ruins. It was the most amazing place I've ever been and the only time I've ever gotten chills from a location. I recommend everyone check it out.

__________________
"The question isn't who is going to let me, it's who is going to stop me." (Ayn Rand)
"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers." (M. Scott Peck)

snowy

I've taken a lot of great vacations--a month backpacking around the United States with my family (we traveled by train), two weeks visiting Las Vegas and the Canyonlands, two weeks visiting the Netherlands, Paris, and London...

It's really a toss-up between a vacation I took with some girls I'm no longer friends with to Vancouver, BC, a choir tour I took in the 12th grade to San Francisco, and the two week vacation to Vegas and the Canyonlands.

With the first, I spent four days in a city I absolutely love with a chance to explore it on my own and see the things I wanted to see, instead of the things my parents wanted to see. I had a great time. We went out just about every night, even if it was just to go down to the hostel bar, have a beer, and watch the hockey. We met tons of cute Australians and New Zealanders who bought us drinks and made us feel spoiled We also got to drink lots of great beer

On the choir tour I got to spend an inordinate amount of time with my best friends, who were both in choir with me, and also some of my good guy friends. I clearly remember that the bus trip between Corvallis, OR and San Francisco was the best part of the trip: I ended up curled up with two of my guy friends reading the Weekly World News and receiving alternating back massages from the both of them. Oh, and they were both very, very good-looking. One of them I took to prom. It was a good choice. We also had some great adventures on our own, especially the whole day we spent at Great America.

The trip to the Canyonlands was also a particular favorite. After six days spent in Las Vegas we visited the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, and Bryce Canyon National Park. I saw the Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam. I also saw Lake Powell before they started lowering it. I would have to say my favorite part of the trip was a morning spent hiking in Zion National Park. We hiked up the Hanging Gardens Trail. To me, it was one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen, and I would really like to go back.

Sometime this summer or fall my honey and I want to take a vacation somewhere. Right now the choices are: roadtrip to California down the Coast to Santa Barbara to visit a friend (which is a good choice because I love Santa Cruz) or a few days spent in Vancouver, BC. We'll see which happens. Both sound good to me!

__________________
If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

highthief

The most recent one to England and Scotland and getting the chance to show my wife and child some of the great places there that I had seen before and to visit some new ones.

__________________
Si vis pacem parabellum.

maleficent

I've been to a lot of great places - but am not good at the whole vacation thing - relaxing is not something I ever really been good at...

The last really relaxing vacation I took was to Moorea (french polynesia) many many moons ago. If I were the crew of the Bounty - I would have left the ship to captain bligh, and jumped ship and went to Moorea forever...

the weather was amazing... (I have pretty much non-tannable skin - but I spent about a month in a tanning salon before i went so I had a great base - other pasty white folks ended up with some pretty severe sun burns and sun poisoning) The resort, a club med resort, was a little too summer campy for my taste, so my friend and I would head off on our own and do stuff - -way better than playing silly games with drunken imbeciles...

The island was absolutely gorgeous... The natives as friendly as you can get... If paradise exists -- it's Moorea.

__________________

Poppinjay

Lake Tillery, NC. It was my first real vacation after a couple of years working half a country away in a place I absolutely hated. I was depressed, and had no real motivation to do anything to make things better. I was messed up. There was also no natural body of water in the entire state where I lived, and I have always loved living near the water.

Riding on a boat early on a grey morning, sitting in the front as a cool spray occasionally misted up, I just went into a trance and could feel my brain working things out. That 40 minute boat ride was like a month of therapy. Within two years, I was living in the Outer Banks, and engaged.

I've been to lots more interesting places, including a 9/11 induced car trip through New England and out to Nantucket, but no vacation has been more beneficial.

__________________
I think the Apocalypse is happening all around us. We go on eating desserts and watching TV. I know I do. I wish we were more capable of sustained passion and sustained resistance. We should be screaming and what we do is gossip. -Lydia Millet

Eweser

I don't know that I've ever been on a true vacation. A few days here or there.

The one time I remember more than any other is when my step-mom, dad, brother and I went to Arlington, TX. We went to a Rangers game and they were playing the Orioles, who at that time had my favorite player playing shortstop (Cal Ripken Jr.). Then we went to Six Flags. We had a great time.

__________________
"Whoever wrote this episode should die!"

sailor

Last spring break, I went to visit friends in London and Florence. Had an absolutely wonderful time. It was my first time in Europe, and I hadn't seen any of these guys in a while, so we had a blast.

Conversely, I'm now studying abroad in Europe, which basically is a long vacation, but I hate it. Dunno why, but I think a lot of it has to do with the people. Here, I've yet to meet anyone I enjoy hanging out with; when I came here last spring, I was with people I had a blast with.

__________________
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
--Plato

Sultana

I'd have to say the 2 weeks in Europe (one week in Germany and one week in Spain) was fantastic. It was the first really big travel I'd done, and certainly the first time I have had two weeks off of work since I was 16.

Maui was also amazing too. I want to go back to the Molokini crater...

__________________
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath.
At night, the ice weasels come." -

Matt Groening

My goal? To fulfill my potential.

dogzilla

Jamaica. We stayed in a small hotel at one end of the beach in Negril, away from the town itself. It was pretty quiet and relaxing there, and there were plenty of tours to other places on the island.

2nd best was 2 weeks by bus in Europe, seeing a few spots in London, Brussels, Venice, Rome, Florence, Monaco and Paris plus a few other stops. It was my first time in Europe and gave me ideas where to visit if I ever decide to go back. Crazy pace though, and I wanted to sleep for a week when I got back.

BadNick

A few years ago, my wife ...now ex... and I were invited to stay at a friends house in the Bahamas on one of the little out islands called Harbour Is. We flew into Eleuthera and then took a small boat to Harbour I. His house was quite large and magnificent with pickled cedar and pink and blue tile everywhere (it might have been owned at one time by British royalty) overlooking both the ocean on one side and the strait between Eleuthera on the other and his property went right across from one side to the other, near the tip of the island. It was fabulous, very private and quiet but beautiful ...beach sand was pink in one area. To add to our pleasure, his housekeeper/cook, Angela, also happened to own and run one of the better restaurants on that island, and she and her husband baked fresh bread every day, dove for lunch lobsters ...langostino types... and conch every day. Our friend was relatively wealthy and had a taste for expensive champagne, so we drank too much of that too. Ahhh, that was the life ...at least for that week. The housekeeper's husband, Vincent, was a fantastic nice, interesting guy; at that time my ex and I were trying to have our first child and having difficulties conceiving, so he made me an old traditional Bahamian fertility drink ...pretty slimy stuff but they don't call me garbage mouth for nothin' (old days that is)... and I downed it, a year later our daughter was born We explored a lot of the nearby islands - this friend had a speed boat with which we explored some of the most interesting, unusual sites throughout the Bahamas, fantastic places I never hear about.

Unusual prelim to above ...as our flight was about to leave Miami airport, it happened to be Bahamian Independence Day coming up, so large crowds of Bahamians were trying to get home. Sadly ...but I didn't volunteer my seat back... a couple were bumped from the flight to make room for us ugly Americans. That plane had live chickens running around in the cabin ...actually a fun ride in itself.

BadNick

Another very memorable one for me:

I was on a business trip in Idaho, working at a national nuclear research facility in the desert - of course alone, no family with me. My business ended mid day Wednesday, so thinking that I like to explore and have never been in that area, I drove my rental car, an Olds Cutlass, east thru some of the most magnificent fertile fields I've seen, where a lot of the potato farms were. Trying to absorb as much of the fantastic beautiful scenery, stopping often to look around and take pics, I drove along the Snake River in Idaho, then thru the west side foothills of the Tetons, thru the mountains and over into Wyoming. Quite unplanned, I ended up staying a few days at a bread & breakfast in Wilson, Wyoming ...a few miles down a dirt road that you would never travel unless you had reason... the B&B was owned and operated by a very nice guy and his family, who lived there but had several beautiful rustic rooms overlooking the valley, they served homecooked gourmet meals, relax by the fireplace ...I was sure heaven was in Wyoming. The owner had previously owned the first rafting outfit on the Snake R. a few years before, sold that and went to explore the Amazon with his wife for a year, came back and did this B&B, so he was quite an interesting guy and knew the area. He gave me all sorts of tips on where and what to explore. My favorite part was that this was all taking place during the last week of May, so the weather was still cool and brisk but sunny, but there was still remnants of lots of snow around - eight feet of it off the sides of the road in the high elevations over 10,000ft. I drove up from Wilson to explore the Grand Tetons, Lake Jenny, etc, then up to Yellowstone. All the while, I barely ever even saw another human being ...which is what I kinda enjoyed since it was so unusual. Late May is before all the tourists hit the parks and even the park rangers were not yet in most of the ranger stations. As I drove my "off road" Olds Cutlass up some of the back roads into the hills, hoping I wouldn't get stuck someplace cause this was pre-cell phone days, I saw golden eagles soaring over the hills, of cours huge herds of elk, lots of moose, and from afar, even a couple grisly bears. As I drove on some roads, the signs at the entrance would say "caution - grisly area" and I'm thinking I must be the only food around here for miles and not even a gun for protection. At one point in Yellowstone after driving about an hour without another human around, I had to stop on a bridge overlooking a gorgeous valley with a roaring stream, while a large herd of buffalo walked across the bridge, sniffed at my car with me sitting in it with windows rolled up getting close up shots of buffalo nostrils. Because it was late May, most of the animals ...elk, moose, etc. had babies nearby which made it even more interesting watching them from so close. My last night/day, I stayed at the Yellowstone Inn, overlooking Old Faithful ...a pretty neat place with only a few other people there, a lot better than if it was full of tourists.

I wished I coulda shared this with somebody else, but a lot of what made it so intersting for me was that I was so alone for most of it.

meembo

The trip started with a funeral for a first cousin. I had to drive from Connecticut to South Dakota, and I took my two sons with me. There was a problem moving my cousin's body back to South Dakota, and I had about a week for the trip out, so my boys and I camped in parks on the Great Lakes on the way out. We had a great time enjoying the simplest pleasures of life. We fished and built sandcastles and all that stuff.
We attended the funeral. It was sad, of course, but good to see far flung friends of my childhood, the people I saw every Thanksgiving and Christmas of my childhood. My kids got to play with new friends, and drive a tractor for the first time, and ride a horse for the first time, etc.
I was way the hell away from home, so I decided to make a memorable road trip out of the excursion. From South Dakota, the boys and I drove south, meandering through the midwest before visiting a friend in Arkansas for a few days. From there, the boys and I drove along the gulf coast (kind of) to the Atlantic. We drove for a few hours each day, and camped in a new place each night. We saw lots of things we had never seen before. One highlight was the trip to Graceland the week of the 25th anniversary of Elvis' death. We stayed in parks and camped most nights, and swam in rivers when we felt like it, and I taught my oldest son to drive for the first time. I slept side by side with my kids each night, and we avoided every freeway we possibly could.
We stopped and camped in several places in North Carolina, one of my favorite places in the entire world. We camped in the mountains in the west and on the beaches in the east, on the Outer Banks, where we visited Kitty Hawk, something my son always wanted to see. We went to Washington DC -- got a hotel that night! -- and we saw all the big monuments at night in the dark, which was fabulous.
We were gone for a month, and I remember how great it was to be with my favorite people and being a kid again, too.

__________________
less I say, smarter I am

Impetuous1

My best vacation was my trip to Italy in 1993. My senior year of high school. I went with my mom. It was only for a week but we saw Rome, Venice and Florence. It was my only trip to Europe and it was glorious. One day I will go back. Especially to Rome. I loved that city. You could feel the great age of the city around you. It was truly awesome, in the traditional sense of that word. Venice was heartbreakingly beautiful. We had taken the train into the Venice and were looking for the door out of the station. We thought we saw a beautiful large photo. Until someone walked through the photo. It was a large glass wall and door. I think both our mouths dropped open when we realized it was real. Florence was nice too. We got to see several pieces of artwork. But, in the end, I left my heart in Rome.

darkangel

Mine seems so insignificant.. but I went to Jasper, Alberta and it was the first time I've ever seen the mountains or a decent river.. It was so nice to get out of the plains. Now if I could just get to Europe!

__________________
"I'm gonna die when it's time for me to die.. so let me live my life the way I want to." - Jimi Hendrix