Like many people, we’ve often rented or borrowed multi-room dwellings for many of our vacations. I guess it all started with our honeymoon in a cabin at Hard Labor Creek State Park. I remember an early tripp to Fripp with my sister and her husband, and later visits to Hilton Head, including several time-share weeks graciously donated by the same sister & husband. We’ve spent more than one anniversary week at an isolated cabin in the woods of The Last Resort. During our more-children/less-money phase, we were privileged to stay at a family site on Smith Lake in North Central Alabama, and had some great times at a rustic church lodge near Black Mountain, NC.
As our children became adults with Real Jobs, we looked for opportunities that would still be meaningful while leveraging their limited vacation and holiday time, finally settling on spending Thanksgiving week on Edisto Island on the South Carolina coast. We stayed at several beach-front rental houses there until we found the perfect large-family-house on the marsh, to which we have faithfully returned over the past several years.
My birthday sailing lessons in 2005 started a growing affection for Lake Sidney Lanier, so we added a Memorial Day water stay, trying several VRBO properties at various places around the lake, learning some of the pros and cons of lake real estate.
All of these excursions featured great fun and food, and most included friends and family fellowship (The Last Resort excluded, for what are hopefully obvious reasons.) They also included some form of non-automotive transportation, ranging from bicycling on Fripp Island to canoe trips, hiking on mountain trails, sailing, skiing at Smith, and, most recently, kayaks and ski-dos. We have been fortunate to build some great memories, with only a few stitches, the occasional cast, and an extra pound or two to show for it.
Now, to get to the point of this posting, there’s a common, but easily overlooked thread running through these trips that I want to touch on. In almost every case, I have greatly enjoyed acquiring, or in some cases even generating, maps and charts of our locale and surroundings. It’s no secret that I am a fan of the visual representation of information, and a good map is a unique pleasure for me.
Now I am starting to look at maps with a slightly different perspective: these will be “closer to home”, shall we say, and they will be relevant more than one or two weeks a year.
Sounds like fun to me!