Vacations

So Nathan and I are optimistic that he will be finishing his degree next June. (However, you really can't tell with a Ph.D. until you get a little closer to defending your dissertation, so I have to state this date with the caveat that it may not happen, but we are hoping it does!)

Graduating will be great for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that the time between graduating and starting a job will be the perfect time for a family vacation. Which is a BIG deal. At least to me. Because we haven't gone on vacation since our honeymoon, four and a half years ago. I mean, we've spent the occasional weekend away from home, but we haven't gone on a real vacation in a really long time.

Speaking of our honeymoon, let me just tell you that it was FANTASTIC. We went to the Canadian Rockies, to Banff National Park. We stayed right on Lake Louise, and if you know anything about the area, you know that that is a fabulous hotel. It was a dream. There was snow everywhere and it was like zero degrees (we got married in December), which was a total novelty to a couple of kids from central/south Texas. We loved it. We did some really fun things like hike around the lake, take a gondola to the top of a mountain, and hike through a canyon (which was hilarious, because you would have thought that it was the only canyon in the world by how melodramatic the signage was--like "You would think that this rock would last forever . . . but it won't.") But hands down, the most fun thing we did was go dog sledding. It was a blast.

However, we haven't been on vacation since. There are several reasons for this. First of all, hello, Nathan is a grad student. That means we don't just have all the disposable income in the world. Secondly, we've used all our vacation time to visit family in Texas a couple times a year.

So for the last little while, I've been talking about when we're going to get to go on vacation and where. We figured out that the most likely "when" will be next summer, right after Nathan graduates (if he graduates in June), before he starts his job.

So that leaves us with the "where." At first I was thinking it'd be fun to go somewhere out west, like Yellowstone or Glacier National Park. Nathan is so fun when he is outdoors, because he enjoys it so much. You can tell he kind of comes alive. He has missed expansive space, the smell of the desert, animals, and having a nice tan. :) He is not one to love the city all that much. And although I'm not exactly what you'd call an outdoorsy kind of person, the fact that he gets excited about something makes me excited about it, too, so I think I would enjoy a trip out west. So that is Option #1.

Option #2 is to go to England. Matthew and Emily (Nathan's youngest brother and his wife) are definitely moving to Cambridge in September for Matthew to work on his graduate degree there, and I would love to go visit and tour around England and Scotland. I spent a summer studying abroad at Cambridge in college, and I had the time of my life. I would totally go live there. I loved Scotland, too. And I'm such an Anglophile. I love most things British: the history, the literature, the culture, the accent, the tea. :) Nathan's parents are thinking of going over to do some research next summer, and I just think it would be an awesome vacation to go when all of us would be there at the same time. Nathan loves it there, too--he was actually born in Cambridge and grew up there off and on until he was seven or eight. But he hasn't missed England like he's missed the west.

So what do you think? Where would you go? Would you opt to go out west, to the UK, or would you pick something else?