What was your favorite childhood vacation?

I've been trying to remember all my vacations from childhood and, if you lived a life similar to mine, you might be doing this too. If so, what ended up being your favorite trip as a kid, if any?<br><br>Mine ended up being this one from 1997. I didn't know my grandfather well, but when I was about six I found out we would be going on this trip together as just the two of us. The trip was a high-speed rail trip from the East coast to the West coast of the US. We stayed in hotels and slept on the train. We took different routes on the way there and the way back, so I got to see a lot of the country. <br><br>I remember seeing the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon for the first time, and those were very influential. I didn't know anyone else who took a long, multi-state trip as a kid (although my dad took his brother on a long road trip in the 1970s!).<br><br>I took a similar trip just last year, in 2022, from the East coast to the West coast as well. I was thinking about that trip a lot since I had a child of my own last year, now growing up herself. If I'm being completely honest, I think there was a small part of this trip that was for me trying to convince myself that I was still young. But a larger part of it was planning ahead for my daughter, thinking about different ways I could engage with her as she grows up, especially if I get to a point in my life where I have more time and financial resources to devote to her. So the trips I take now, I'm thinking ahead to future trips I can take with her when she's older, trips I can plan with her as the audience. <br><br>There’s a tradition among parents taking a last trip before their kid is born, the “babymoon”, but I wanted to do something similar for my daughter and plan out trips from when she’s a toddler to when she’s an adult. I read an article where parents would give their kids $1,000 to go on trips on their own once they turned 18. Or you might have heard about some wealthy parents who give their kids a trip around the world after they graduate business school.<br><br>My daughter still has to grow up a lot before we can engage with those kinds of high-level trips, but I imagine that my relationship with her will change over time as she gets older and decides how much she wants to participate in different kinds of activities. I imagine we will go high and low, and there will be a period of time at the end of her teenage years where we will level off and maybe travel less as I get older and she becomes less interested and starts to focus on her career and starting her own life.<br><br>So lately I've been thinking about trips I took with my dad and grandfather as a kid, trips I took with friends in college and after graduating, and trips I imagine my daughter and I will take. I imagine her as an 18-year-old, backpacking across Europe, and business school graduate, taking a private jet across the Middle East. And I imagine me as her father, getting older and eventually passing away before I can see the end of her travels.<br><br>That's all just speculation though. It's possible I don't get to take any trips with my daughter, and it's also possible she never leaves the state. It's crazy how we can't predict the future, and sometimes life seems so random. Since I became a dad I've been more appreciative of other parents, especially the ones I see struggling in public. <br><br>I feel like many times my daughter is the source of great joy and great stress, kind of like this trip, where we had some amazing experiences but at the same time some trying times due to delays or cancellations. It was a long and expensive trip, and I don't know if it's the last time I'll take a long-distance train trip in the US. It was definitely a different experience this time around, though I still see the beauty of the US high-speed rail. I had to take some deep breaths when this trip got difficult, thinking back to those childhood trips with my dad and grandparents and imagining similar experiences with my daughter in the future.