Vacations shouldn’t really be planned. Sure, you have to plan when, you have to plan where, but the what, for a true vacation, has to be spontaneous. There might be a thousand and one possibilities or five, but for it really to be a vacation, none of those attractions can really be put into any kind of schedule. Then it becomes a trip, and a trip and vacation are two totally different animals.

Vacations have flexible schedules, flexible activities, ice cream at half past ten in the morning, late mornings, late nights, kids begging to “do it again” and parents being able to reply, “how about tomorrow?”

If all of that is true, we don’t get to go on vacation very often. K and I have always been all about the “plan maximum” for a given trip: see as much as you can, do as much as you can. Go, go, go!

This weekend, though, we finally had a vacation. Almost. One planned activity. That doesn’t count, does it? The rest were sort of spontaneous decisions, choices drawn from the various options presented by camping in a small North Carolina mountain town.