Tag: life

Saying Goodbye to a Car You Love
relatable

Saying Goodbye to a Car You Love

Essentially Better LivingLeave a comment
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The past few weeks I have tried imagining our life without my beloved Santa Fe, and I never imagined I would be this sad about giving up a vehicle.

I asked my family and close friends to help me understand why I was so depressed about giving up this car. I have even cried about it on more than one occasion. Instead of teasing me, they were so sympathetic and empathetic. They helped me see I wasn’t crazy or irrational. It leads me to believe that this may be more common than I had realized, perhaps even universal. There are several reasons for this, I think.

We live our life in our cars. My husband reminded me how many memories we’ve made and how many road trips we’ve been on. Our children have grown up in this car. They were age 4 and 8 when we got it, and we’ve had it for 7 years! I looked back at old photos of our kids and this car, and invoked even more tears.

My favorite memories are the vacations and beach trips we’ve taken. We’ve been to Charleston, Tybee Island, Florida, and Gulfport. We believe in enjoying the journey as much as the destination so seeing that rocket at the Tennessee Alabama state line, going to Bucee’s and grabbing a peach milkshake at Peach Park will long live in our memory banks.

The day to day errands and running the girls to all the things are equally memorable. We’ve been on Girl Scout camping trips, to Space Camp, soccer games, gymnastics, swim team, horse riding lessons, piano, guitar, and all of the other activities the girls have explored. We’ve taken car rides with the girls’ friends with the sunroof open singing Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen at the top of our lungs. The time spent in our cars with family and friends means so much, but so does the time we drive solo.

We spend so much time by ourselves in our cars. It has been a safe haven and a quiet space for me when life has been hard, but also such a place of joy as I have spent these 7 years exploring exactly who I want to be going forward in life. Going for a drive can be an escape. It can be therapeutic and even healing. I’ve had many a good cry, gotten frustrated with Siri for botching my voice-to-texts, and yelled at many a bad driver – if only they could hear what I’m saying!! Taking a drive by ourselves in the car can also just be downright fun. So much glorious daydreaming and the best music, cranked up loud.

I love all of the bougie features of my Santa Fe. I love my heated seats and steering wheel. I love my power everything, large and numerous cupholders, and I love the third row with the option to fold it down. Above all, I love my pano sunroof the most.

As days passed coming to terms with saying farewell to my beloved car, and I continued to feel sorrowful, I felt the need to write this in order to process all the feelings. I am reminded of the quote that goes “don’t cry because it’s over, be smile because it happened.”

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Why Are You Taking the Same Vacation Every Year?
travel with kids

Why Are You Taking the Same Vacation Every Year?

Essentially Better LivingLeave a comment

Do you take the same vacation every year? If you answered yes, we did too, and probably for all of the same reasons we did: we loved going there. We also knew our way around, and knew exactly what to expect. We knew we would have a great time, and it was our happy place.

One beautiful spring day, I was sitting outside a coffee shop, enjoying my latte and working on a blog post. At the table next to me were two girls talking about the summer vacations they were planning. One was like me, planning her same favorite beach vacay, and the other said something I will never forget, and the title of this post, “why are you taking the same vacation every year?”

She went on to explain that she intentionally plans a different trip every year, and that there is a whole world to see. She asked her friend if she thought about exposing herself and her family to different places. She talked about how much fun it is to explore new places and to plan for each trip. She said how meaningful and enriching it was for her children to actually visit the places they had read about in their history books. She had fallen in love with adventure and trying new things. She then shared trip experience after trip experience, at which point she had me convinced.

I went home that day and announced to my family that we should start planning a trip somewhere new and different. I thought I would be met with resistance, but to my surprise they were excited. Since then we haven’t repeated a trip since except for one, where we visited our old faithful beach locale for nostalgia’s sake.

I’m not saying to never visit any place twice. And I also realize to some who already love to travel to new places, that all of this may sound obvious. But where I live, I assure you so many families travel to the same place every year, and I wonder if they will look back and feel they missed out. Will you? In a lifetime that is so fleeting, we want to live in a way that we have no regrets, and that we can feel we have lived it to the fullest.

If you take the same vacation every year, consider branching out and trying somewhere different. Ask yourself what you love about that place, and why it is so important you to go there specifically. For us it was partly for financial reasons. Where we loved going was affordable! But I have been pleasantly surprised to discover places all over the map that we now love just as much that are just as affordable and in some cases they even cost less.

My intention for writing this is not to convince anyone that going on the same vacation is wrong. I hope to go to our old favorite again soon, and wish we had the financial means to do both each year: to go somewhere new and to to our beloved beach town. My hope is that someone who has never considered going somewhere new would have their eyes opened to the possibility that they might love another place as much as their old standby.

After reading this, if you feel as convinced and compelled to go somewhere new as I did that day at the coffee shop, I would love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments where you decide to go.