Plans?! I know, right? We saw how well that went last year.
Oddly, though, Covid has caused us to make MORE plans rather than less for this year. We have one set of summer plans for if the Canadian border is open and one for if it’s not. The one for if it’s not takes us through New York and New England, though, and if it were happening today it wouldn’t work either because of travel restrictions.
But it’s NOT happening today, and who knows what the world will look like a few months from now?
Not me.
We are hopeful that Dave at least, as a teacher, will be vaccinated by summer. And I think there’s a decent chance I will be, but I doubt any of the kids, even the officially adult ones (which we’ll have TWO of by June!) will have gotten the chance. So it all kind of depends on what numbers are like and what travel restrictions are like.
With those caveats in mind….summer trip!
I really, really, REALLY want to be able to do a long summer trip this year.
So I’ve planned two of them.
The central part of any trip this summer will, we hope be Cape Cod. The plan is to get together with extended family there to celebrate Dave’s parents’ 50th anniversary. This is another thing we can’t really plan plan yet, since we have no idea what kind of gathering will be possible/appropriate this summer.
We’ve been to the Cape lots and lots of times, but you can never have too many trips to the Cape.
Both versions of the itinerary start the same way and stay the same until our Cape Cod week: the plan is to spend several days in Washington, DC first (after a quick overnight stop somewhere midway), mostly seeing things we’ve always meant to see there but never have, like Ford’s Theater and the National Cathedral. But maybe we’ll recreate this picture one more time, too:
I’m looking forward to having a nice long, unrushed stop there for the first time in awhile.
Then we’ll make our way to upstate New York, where we’ll spend a couple of days in the Hudson Valley so that Milo can visit Bard College (he’s interested in the conservatory there) and we can check out the area a bit. Maybe we’ll revisit the lighthouse in my grandfather’s hometown of Saugerties (there will be a lot more pictures in the beginning of this post, before we get to places we’ve never been before):
Then a couple of days at Sturbridge Village, which we never made it to when we lived in Boston, even though I LOVE living history! Maybe back then I didn’t know how much I loved it. Apparently.
And then we’ll have nearly a week in Boston. Even though we’ve spent tons of time at the Cape, and even though we used to live in Boston (Ari was born there even), we’ve never had a good long chunk of time to do touristy stuff with the kids there. I had to go all the way back to 2009 to find any Boston pictures, in fact, so I guess that’s the last time we were there. Abe wasn’t even anywhere close to being born yet!
So little! (Also, Abe recently wore 2 of those 3 shirts. It’s possible I save too many things. The Mickey Crocs are long gone, though).
We’re planning to do all the touristy stuff in and around Boston: Freedom Trail, Plimoth Plantation (more living history!), etc. We might try to make a return trip to the Museum of Science, where Dave used to work. And we’re staying at the much raved about Normandy Farms, so I’m excited about that, too.
Cape Cod is next, where we’ll….go to the beach a lot. And some other stuff. I’d like to make better use of the bike path this time around than we have before. We have a full week on the Cape.
And here’s where are two itineraries diverge. Our original plan was to spend a lot of time in Canada, seeing Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, and Kingston. But. I think we’ve more or less decided to abandon this plan, because there’s just so much uncertainty about the border being open, and it looks like no decision will be made for a few months now. Another time, Canadian cities!
So new(er) plan! Is that we’ll spend some time exploring New England after Cape Cod. First with a few days near Portsmouth on the coast of New Hampshire, then up to the White Mountains for awhile. And next over to Burlington in Vermont. I’m pretty excited about this stop because Burlington has a campground right on the bike path, a short ride from downtown along Lake Champlain, and that sounds idyllic. Vermont is also the only state that, as of right now, won’t let anyone in at all without a quarantine (most other states with travel restrictions will accept a negative test in place of quarantine). So we’ll see.
From there, we hope to head across New York, with stops at Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame and then in the Finger Lakes to see Watkins Glen State Park and Seneca Falls.
And then we start to have some overlap with our planned 2020 trip that we canceled, as we head to Niagara Falls for a few days and then around the lake to Detroit, with a quick overnight stop near Cleveland first. We bought a membership at the Henry Ford for LAST summer’s trip (there was a Black Friday sale! I thought I was being so smart planning ahead!) that they agreed to put on hold for us for a year. So we’ll do that plus other Detroit stuff, before finally turning south for a short stay in Cincinnati and then…home!
So, yeah. Knock wood.
Aside from the summer trip…we currently have a spring break trip to Nashville and Memphis booked. The idea was that Milo would be able to tour Vanderbilt and maybe sit in on some classes….but that’s looking not terribly likely, so we may swap that trip out for something less city-intensive.
We have a state park pass that came with 3 free nights of camping, so we need to check some new state parks off the list and/or revisit some favorites.
We already have Jekyll Island booked for next Thanksgiving, in hopes that we’ll be able to meet up with Dave’s parents there. I’m always eager to get back to Jekyll:
We have no post Christmas plans yet; we canceled a trip to St. Augustine for that week this past year, so maybe we’ll finally get there this time around.
And there you have it. A lot of detail about a trip that might or might not happen! Ugh.
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