I’ve read once in a book that occasional short family trips can help you lead a harmonious life and strengthen the bond between family members. The heroine of the book was taking her children to trips all over the world with every occasion and this is how they learned the names of all the animals. I thought it was so cool and I wondered why my parents weren’t taking me all around the world teaching me the name of the animals by showing them to me instead of making me paint them. It seemed so obvious to me at that time that this is what all families should do and I could not understand why adults insisted to take only two short weeks of vacation. After I became an adult and a mother of three myself, I started to understand why making weekly trips is not an easy goal to achieve. Besides the fact that we lack the time and money to afford a city-break every week-end with the entire family, family trips are not all that relaxing as they appeared in the book especially when you are the parent and you have small kids with you. On the contrary, there are more chances of you ruining a perfectly fine weekend with a city-break or a trip to the mountainside than you having fun and relaxing on the trip.
The only reason I took my kids to so many excursions is because I know that they are feeling wonderful and that they will return relaxed from the trips, because I personally would usually need a week of rest to recuperate after a three days trip to another city and two weeks of sleeping after a camping night. Last time we went in a city-break with the entire family, we ended up sleeping in a motel outside a dubious city and having to spend all the week-end trying to find a professional locksmith capable of making a car key replica for our car.
It was awful to spend three days locked up in a motel room with three small kids after you, without enough money or clothes and without any hope for the future, because the local locksmith had no idea how to program a transponder car key. It took us a lot of persuasive power to convince another local car locksmith to come to our location and try to make a car key replica, but in the end he was also of no use. We managed to find a professional company that specialized in making transponder car keys replicas online and they were very nice to come to our location. They solved the problem in less than two hours. We reached home after a very tiring weekend and a stressful drive back only to notice that our smallest son has hidden the car keys in his stuffed animal. I guess that it would be too much to ask a three years old to understand that his little joke cost us two nights of accommodation at a four stars hotel, not to mention the other additional expenses caused by the lack of clothes.
