It’s been a cold, windy and dreary winter here in PA and vacations are on my mind.
What was your favorite vacation? and why?
If it involved a beach, what was the most beautiful beach?
What was your worst vacation?
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It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
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We took a family vacation in Cancun Mexico in 1993. It’s where we first heard the Macarena song. It was inexpensive, the people were great as was the food. The beaches could be a bit dangerous but there was a protected cove where our kids could safely swim. There were all sorts of great things to do for the kids, fun shopping for mommy and for daddy the next beach over was private and filled with young European gals all topless. VIVA May-he-co!
Two weeks in Tulum, just south of Cancun in Feb, 1990. Not as built up as Cancun but the same eye candy on the beach. My girlfriend would give me a heads up when a nice looking women was walking by. Cold mexican beer and the ocean, it doesn’t get any better.
I go to a resort in Cancun every year. Was interesting and some fun for the first few years but not so much once you’ve visited all the sites. I still like it for getting away and have made friends I only see when there.
Sicily.
Gorgeous, great food, affordable, island, and the best?
They LOVE Americans because they still remember Patton
kicking the Germans out and the Americans treating them
wonderfully.
My family in Naples had the same sentiment.
My Mom’s lifelong dream was to go to Ireland. I told her I’d take her if I ever got the chance and I did. She was really broke and broken at the time, I took her out first and got her clothes and her hair done. I kept looking at her when I’d wake up during the overnight flight and she was wide awake, told me she was too excited to sleep. Every time I looked she was awake the entire time, I never saw her asleep, she told me she was too excited. It was a tour that landed in Shannon and went counterclockwise around the country. I paid for everything. I told her to get anything she wanted as souvenirs, she got almost nothing, it was just the experience that was enough. Best day of all was May 6, 2001, Mother’s Day in the US. We were in Dublin, I got her a corsage that morning before we boarded a longboat for a Shannon River cruise. Two young guys bought the boat and remade it to do weddings, funerals, etc. Their mother made scones with jam and cream with tea for the trip. My Mom looked like she was about to cry, the water was so blue and swans floated past and she said “I just can’t believe this” over and over. On the bus that took us between cities they told stories. When we got back she said “I feel different now, I feel stronger”.
My wife chaperoned a high school group on a trip through Ireland, Scotland and England. She had a blast. I always wanted to do Ireland and Scotland with her, but it looks like our international travel days are over.
Great story..thanks, KaD
What a great story.
Thank you.
Made my day.
How about another? Before I was born my Mom had a yellow diamond, that was stolen from her by a relative and given to the Church.
In 2019 for Mother’s Day I gave her a shoe box sized box, as she opened the layers she finally got to the tiny box inside containing a 1/3 carat intense yellow diamond with an 18K gold setting on a platinum band. He name was engraved inside, I told her so no one can steal her ring again. Her lip quivered and she wiped tears from her eyes, then gave me a beaming smile. I included a yellow card with a poem:
Long ago when the world was new
the sun bent down and kissed the earth.
And where it did their child was born-
a stone child of the earth infused with the color of the sun.
never been on vacation. ive travelled more than i care to, but always either for work or to see people i already know, friends or relatives. people who feel some need to escape their lives on a vacation are on the one hand, deceiving themselves if they think they will fix something that way, and on the other, need to examine what sucks so much about their lives that they need to escape it, and work on that.
not saying my life hasnt sucked a whole lot. it has. but a vacation was never a solution to any problem i had!
You’re right, your life sucked
You should read KaD’s post above for what travel is for.
It isn’t a “solution to a problem” it’s what makes us human.
We have always been explorers. It’s in our genes.
In my younger days, I was quite the world traveler (30+ countries, all the states). But my favorite trip of all was a month exploring Alaska. I flew into Anchorage, rented a cool car, drove down to Homer (there was a music festival), took the “car on the train” to Seward, visited the Chiswell Islands, ferried over to Valdez, did the whitewater thing, leisurely drove back to Anchorage, staying in small towns.
TBF, I was young woman on my own, and you know what they say – “the odds are good, but the good are odd”.
One example: when I got off the ferry in Valdez, after being chatted up by the entire ship crew, I checked into my hotel, and found a bar. The door burst open and 30 sweaty men surrounded me and started fighting over who would buy my next drink. The crew on the ship had run from bar to bar looking for me. True story.
Tahiti was nice too.
We did a week on a Holland America cruise up the Alaska coastline, then flew to Prudhoe Bay and bused down the Dalton Highway. A week on each of the two parts. We were the young ones on the trip.
I bow hunted caribou in the middle of nowhere Alaska for two weeks.
3 hour floatplane ride over Taylor Pass to get to the hunting grounds.
It was transcendental. It was like life 10,000 years ago. Never saw another human.
Incredible experience.
While I was still working, my wife and I took 22 days to ride the entire US border on our Goldwing. We hit all four corners of the US in 20 days and watched 4th of July fireworks with locals sitting in a parking lot in Maine. Someday we’ll do it again.
Ah, the Four Corners Tour. I’d like to do that but probably won’t. Wife won’t go and none of my friends are dedicated enough.
Not my story and only kind of a vacation but a retired guy I read about lives in Arizona. In the spring he rides his motorcycle to Seattle and boards a ferry.
Ferry floats him and the bike up Whittier, Ak where he disembarks and rides to a resort run by one of the cruise lines in the Alaskan interior.
Spends the summer working at the resort and in his time off tours the countryside near the resort. Comes fall he backtracks to Whittier, ferry, Seattle and home for the Arizona winter.
Sounds like a pretty cool gig.
That would be cool!
Vacation? What’s that?
My whole life feels like a vacation, does that count?
If there was one memory that stood out above all the rest was canoeing the Delaware River with my father when I was young. Fishing, making camp, building fires, listening to him read Mark Twain in the tent by flashlight until I fell asleep. The feeling of the Sun on my skin, the sound of the water, the landscape rolling away with the current and my father right there with me the whole time.
I don’t think it has as much to do with a place as it does with who you spend it with.
My favorite vacation with my buddies
THAT was a LOL moment for me, Sir. Thx.
I know which one put it down as the worst.
Squeal like a pig
“You’d better pray. You’d better pray real good.”
“Hey fellas. Let’s just keep this to ourselves, OK? I don’t want this getting around.”
Poor Ned.
“What other movies have you been in, Mr. B?
I ain’t too far from Arkansas. Kind of scary.
The guy who ended up dead (Drew?) must also be considered, although he couldn’t put anything down after having been put down himself.
Ned- “soowhee, …soo whee,…SOOOWHEEE!” (he did have a mighty purty mouth)
Why was Joe Biden there playing the banjo?
LMAO, yeah buddy.
When first time away from home at 16 I lost my virginity within hours of landing in London.
(but I bet you’ll get more replies for the worst vacation)
August 1984, 14 days on the French Riviera.
All of them. It was the cold war, someone had to drink and fornicate their way through it.
10 days driving all over Belgium sampling beer and seeing castles and medieval towns, followed by Amsterdam at the same time the High Times Cannabis cup was in town and Thanksgiving celebrated at a Cinese restaurant served by Dutch speaking Chinese staff. Just very nice to be out of the states. I don’t think foreign travel will ever be in our future again. Sad.
everyone that i’ve taken my boys on fishing trips, float trips, camping trips, family vacations, the long car rides across the country, time spent one on one with my boys the best of times.
Probably the 7-day rafting tour down the Colorado river, through the Grand Canyon.
Just a tiny bit behind in ranking: the 14-day Maldives trip, with 12 days of scuba diving.
That were my two most extravagant vacations, but lot of cheap fantastic ones too.
-Motorcycle and small tent: 18 days Greece Peloponnes from one camping site to the next, all on ocean front with sand beaches.
-Throw a bag of clothes, one pack of soda and water each in the trunk of my car, then 12 days Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Salt Lake City. (Ran out of time to make it to Arches NP.)
The three weeks we spent in Romania was definitely our best vacation.
UP of MI, twice. The first time was in the Winter with my ex. We took a ride on the Snow Train, saw the frozen falls, saw a hockey game at the home team’s bench as the visitors. The temp was 3 below and it felt beautimous. We stayed in an A frame that I still want to purchase.
The second time was with my former best friend in the Summer. There were so many people, but the sun setting at 10 PM was eerie.
Edit: Worst was a family reunion in Maine. Everyone was ready to do bodily harm to others in the end, plus, I had over 50 mosquito bites. Benadryl was my friend. Helped me sleep.
2nd that one, Leah. Drove up to the point at Copper Harbor during the awesome Autumn color change years ago, making it all the way to Lake Superior.
Tahquamenon Falls in winter was pretty awesome, too.
If you’re ever in Luce County, get to the banks of the Two Hearted River, and
drop a line in the water. Maybe you’ll hook a brookie, brown, or rainbow for dinner.
Of course, it helps if you have a couple of longnecks of the same name, from Belle’s.
~Cheers
I’ll keep that in mind. When I retire, the UP of MI is where I want to be.
Cheers.
If they seceded, we’d be up there in a heartbeat. My wife’s parents were from Munising and Hubbell. Went up to Hubbell for her mom’s funeral during October. The most beautiful fall colors. Even the old cemetery was beautiful in its own way. Another territory screwed over by the Feds in culling favor with the LP over the Ohio border dispute. Truly they should be their own separate state, or part of Wisconsin.
Actually, thought about it a bit, and changed my mind from my original. Just before the plannedemic, my wife and I traveled by car with our dog (her last trip) to Connecticut and New Hampshire. In CT I buried my father’s ashes in the grave with his mother, scattered the ashes of my mom, grandmother, and uncle in Long Island sound from the jetty at Seaside Park near Bridgeport, went to many cemeteries in the area to see dead relatives, got to meet a cousin I had never met, another I hadn’t seen in 47 years along with her sons, and my parent’s best man at their wedding who I used to call uncle and hadn’t seen in 47 years. In N.H. we arrived on Columbus Day weekend at the peak of the fall color and were blown away. Grabbed some great local beers, went to the top of Mt. Washington, and truly enjoyed the scenery. Visited Sleepy Hollow and its cemetery on the way home to keep the cemetery theme going in advance of Halloween, drove down Skyline Drive through the Shenandoah Valley, and had a most wonderful vacation right before TPTB decided to shit all over our world. I don’t know if the past 2 years would have been as tolerable if not for the trip right before it all began. Family and nature truly make the best vacations.
Everyone is talking about their great vacations, so I will focus on one of my worst, an alcohol fueled misadventure.
I was in my late 20’s and stationed at a military base on the York River in Virginia. My comrade in arms Mike and I decided to spend the upcoming Thanksgiving 4-day liberty camping. Traveling home was too far for both of us. The base had gear to rent, so we got a 2-man tent and a few other basics. At the time I had a folding two seat kayak with a sailing rig that I hauled around in the trunk of my car. For provisions we had plenty of alcohol, cigarettes and beef jerky, potato chips and so on. No real food that I can remember. We left after dark on Wednesday and had a great sail up the river with following wind, seas, and currents. We stopped at a restaurant we saw on the shore, and surprisingly enough they let us in. This place was swanky and all we could afford were a couple of beers and some appetizers.
We continued in the dark and came to a small island, just a sand bar with a few bushes growing out of the top. Good enough. We set up camp. My memory of Thanksgiving that year is quite hazy, but I think we spent the day drinking and swapping stories. The next morning the weather was starting to deteriorate. Steady icy rain and wind, which we were in no way prepared for. We decided to head to a town we had passed and get some food and more booze. We found a place that served breakfast, and the locals were all getting drunk before 9 A.M. so we joined right in. Towards late afternoon we went to a nearby grocery store to buy some food, and I think they sold beer and wine there too. One way or the other our four-day supply that we drank in two days was replenished.
As we were leaving the grocery store at dusk, Mike announced that he was hypothermic and there was no way he could go back to the island. He looked like hell. We hatched a scheme: After warming up in the store for a while, he would hitch hike back to the base, with my car keys and bring back my car to a road we had seen on the mainland next to the island. When he got there, he was to flash the lights to let me know. I would sail back to the island in the dark, break camp, and launch for the car on his signal. I would try to signal him from time to time so he might find the island.
The sail to the island was wild. It was complicated by the fact that this was night, in a storm, I was drunk, alone, and the island was no longer there, due to storm surge. All I could see was some tops of bushes and a little bit of a collapsed tent. I grabbed on to the tent and tried to pull it in to the boat, but it was full of water and our waterlogged sleeping bags. After what seemed like an hour of struggle, I got all the gear I could on board and looked for signals. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing so hard that every light on shore was flashing because of branches moving in front of them. I could not stay where I was though, hanging on to tops of shrubs to anchor the boat, each wave threatening to swamp me.
Eventually I saw lights that looked like they might be a car. It was a one-shot deal, as there was no going back into the storm if I was wrong. As I got closer to the light, I saw it was my car! After a crash landing on the shore, we folded up the boat and the gear, and headed up the bank. The road was a layer of mud and sharp bits of crushed shale or maybe slate. I shredded a pair of tires making it out of there. Somehow Mike was able to get our deposit back on the tent even though it was destroyed.
Lest any of you think I am a hopeless drunkard, I did give up alcohol about 13 years after this trip, and remain alcohol free to this day, approximately 30 years sober.
We lived in Europe for 8 years and had many fantastic trips.
One of the more memorable, as Valentine’s day is upon us, was a week in Paris.
Wifey and I doinking on our outside balcony at 3am with the lights of Paris shining all around was quite memorable.
Ou-La-La.
Best-New Orleans ’86 Super Bowl with private balcony hotel room overlooking Bourbon St. and sneaking into the NFL players party.
Worst- Miami in a hotel oversold to German tourists (no food and topless unshaven monsters around the pool)
this is hilarious…the administrator clearly asks for “your worst vacation”…and the nimrods that come here everyday spew their bullshit about their best ones = hahahahahahaha!!!
p.s. and it wasn’t the Jews that made you do it…YOU REALLY ARE THAT STUPID!!
Go back and reread the title, cement head.
My worst will be hard to top. Went on a planned week-long trip to Utah from Calif. Took our two dogs with us. They were always good off leash, and nearly nobody in the campground as we walked back from the self-pay station the first night. All of a sudden they spotted something up ahead and took off after it. Turned out to be a skunk. Skunk managed to hit both between the eyes with its spray. All we had was a couple of huge tomatoes with us to try and kill the smell. Both of them vomited immediately upon being hit and my wife and I both nearly did. If you’ve never been that close to the action and the fresh spray, that lingering smell you occasionally get a whiff of has nothing on the raw stuff. So we sacrificed a sleeping bag to cover the back of the car and headed home immediately. Dozens of deer crossing the highway on the way home to make things worse. Had to get gas in St. George Utah. Folks avoided our vehicle at the station. Thankfully the CA inspection station just waved us through. It was at least 6 months before you couldn’t smell the skunk on them anymore.
A week on a live aboard sail boat scuba diving in the Bahamas at places that a land based operation could not get you to. Highlight was sitting on the deck eating popcorn, drinking rum punch and watching a total eclipse of the moon one night, night dive with loggerhead turtles then watching the Perseid meteor shower in the complete darkness the next night and feeding with the sharks the last day.
I love this site. I found TBP 2 years ago. Thank you Jim and Avalon. I never post because am rarely on a device with a keyboard.
I hope that someday we can meet everyone at HSF’s annual 7/4 gathering. For now my husband and I are doing everything we can to survive and thrive what’s coming, as well as making the world a better place for our grandkids and future generations to flourish. Being producers rather than consumers. I love all of you TBPers and am grateful for all I’ve learned from you.
My favorite vacation was last year. My wonderful husband planned a 15 day road trip to Yellowstone. The coff did not exist there, unless you were in a park facility. And bygolly there was a national coin shortage!
My parents took us on many long road trips when we were K-12 age. We learned so much from talking among ourselves, parents included of course, about what we saw; we had sheets that my mom drew up with pics of cows, horses, bridges, etc that we competed to complete. My mom usually gave us a running commentary based on AAA travel book descriptions of historical sites. I never had a bad vacation. As an adult I rarely vacationed but the best one was with my wife before our marriage. We cruised the Mediterranean Sea between Athens and Istanbul and finished with a week in Paris (early May). The Air France flight from Istanbul featured the audio system playing the theme from “A Man and a Woman” as we were landing and it just made my day!
The most carefree days of my life. Ocean City Md. Sex on the beach when you’re in your early 20s…simply unforgettable.
Hopping a C-130 to Germany for 2 weeks from Turkey for my break; 2 weeks in Florida from North Dakota and Nebraska at Christmas 7 times to visit relatives; 2 months in the Summers when teaching; a bad vacation is like bad sex.
Best vacation was Iceland with a sibling. Bar hopping, delicious food, and endless hot springs. Worst was a road trip last year to Vegas, grand canyon, camping, culminating in my best friend’s suicide. It kinda put a damper on the year.
wife’s first employer was a prince of a man and let our young family use his cottage near the Penobscot bay in Maine…provided much beauty and peace at a crazy busy time in our lives. Nearby Belfast and Camden are quintessential Maine towns…would love to get back there if time and circumstance ever allow.
great smoky mountain national park….visited last year…was also a pleasant surprise: much more beautiful than expected. The waterfalls and tumbling rivers were striking.
trying to think of something for upcoming 20 year wedding anniversary. Ireland, Croatia and Slovenia are topping the list, but Georgia looked amazing too. In the US, Mt St. Elias in Alaska and Grand Tetons are two places we would love to see.
worst vacation was a short family reunion weekend to the catskills….air b and b we rented was a formerly occupied meth house and brothel…shit you not. Mountains were pretty though.
bon voyage