by Kayleen Ott
Family vacation has always been a big part of my life growing up. And when I say family vacation, I don’t just mean my parents, my two younger sisters, little brother and myself—NO! I mean all of us plus both sets of grandparents and my uncle! All eleven of us have gone on vacation every year, sometimes multiples times a year for as long as I can remember, and those times have created memories that I will cherish forever. Since we all lived in Florida, several of our vacations consisted of our traveling four hours to Orlando and staying in my grandparents’ time share.
Our week typically consisted of a trip to a Disney park for a day or two and spending the rest of the time enjoying other fun activities. I have so many pleasant memories from our vacations together. I always loved when we went to the parks all together. We would take turns sitting together in pairs on all of our favorite rides, and we would always get to watch the fireworks show together at the end of the day. Sometimes just my parents and my siblings and I would get to go walk around downtown Disney and look in all the neat shops there. I think our favorite store was and still is the candy store!
One of our favorite things that the whole family would do was take a Disney bus with all eleven of us and go to Disney’s transportation center and get on a monorail and ride around to each of the different resorts it stopped at. We would get off at each stop and walk around and explore the property and the shops. We’ve done it so many times, but it is still one of my most favorite things to do! My parents loved it too because, when we were younger especially, it provided a few hours entertainment for us kids, and it was completely free!
At our time share, we were able to play on the mini golf course that the resort offered, ride the surrey bikes, rent the paddle boats, and play tennis and basketball. If we decided on basketball, Grandpa Ott was always the one who wanted to play with us. Inside our room, we loved gathering around the table and playing games with my grandma (and sometimes grandpa) or simply watching a video all together at the end of the day. Sometimes my grandparents would bring their Wii. Playing the different games on that with my grandparents was always hilarious! Even though our vacations almost always consisted of the same activities, we still enjoyed them as we got older, only in different ways.
Once I reached the teenage years though, I would sometimes get a little discontent and impatient with what we were doing, and I would get frustrated if we didn’t do what I wanted to do and when I wanted to do it. But eventually I learned that having that kind of an attitude didn’t help anything, and it certainly did not make the vacation any more fun. It just made the vacation miserable for me and for everyone else. Once I learned just to be patient and go with the flow, everything was so much better. I found that it wasn’t necessarily what we were doing but who we were doing it with that mattered. I learned to enjoy the little things and to find something positive in every situation.
Looking back, the best memories aren’t always the big things that we did, but all the little moments in between when we shared a laugh or even when something didn’t go right—like when my grandma’s electric scooter decided to die in the middle of the day when we were at a park or when my uncle Kurt flipped his electric scooter on its side! Even the times it rained at the parks created some pretty cool memories. All that being said, I have learned that through all the different vacations we have been on as a family, good and bad, they are always better when I have a good spirit and a positive attitude.
