Old Gulch

I’m feeling a little guilty at the moment (a lapsed Catholic I feel guilty almost constantly).  It’s school holidays and we have gone nowhere.  Now if that was a once off I wouldn’t mind, but we spend a lot of holidays, well not actually holidaying anywhere.

You can count on one hand the number of organised holidays we have taken.  Stradbroke Island a couple of times, Rainbow Beach and Lord Howe Island. My husband has taken the girls camping by himself another couple of times (I don’t camp well). Previously, we did regular trips to Port Macquarie to visit family but now that we have moved here it doesn’t seem like a holiday anymore.

I have vivid memories of yearly trips to the Central Coast, Umina and Patonga in particular, where we went without fail, no matter the weather. Similarly, my husband still has a soft spot for the South Coast where his family went every year, speaks fondly of almost drowning at Narooma.

I worry that I haven’t created for my children a similar attachment that they can wax nostalgically about in adulthood.  Have I left it too late at 14 and 11 to create that for them?

It’s not that I’ve meant to kill the family holiday.  Do you know how much it costs to get a family of four anywhere? Not to mention pay for a kennel for two dogs? The crappy little fibro cottage holiday rentals of my youth seem to have disappeared and in their place are the designer “beach shacks” which come with a designer price tag. In the daily juggle of bill paying the cash for holidays always seems to get diverted to some other emergency.

Other families seem to manage it with regular trips overseas, cruises interspersed with the odd elcheapo camping trip.  But somehow we don’t seem to get our act together enough to get anywhere.

I wonder if in today’s world the simplicity of the annual trip to the same place has lost it’s appeal? Is it more important now for parents to give their children a variety of experiences which means something different each hols?

In the meantime it’s raining yet again in Port and looks like it might be yet another day spent in pyjamas in front of the TV, I’m a bad, bad, mother.

Lord Howe Island