From last Monday to Friday, I took a family vacation. To me, a family vacation is not an easy project. Because of my wife’s visual impairment, she has difficulties with long vehicle rides, walking, or being exposed to sunlight for long, and other outdoor activities. If she walks for longer than a half mile, her legs will swell, she will feel pain in her shoulders and neck and other combination of physical difficulties.
In comparison, my daughter has a bucket list that includes skydiving, world’s tallest bungee jumping, or riding the world’s highest roller coaster, etc. To have a same trip with these two women of different interest requires a great consideration and sacrifice on their part. It also is not very easy for me to satisfy both persons at the same time and we always experience hurt feeling at least several times during a trip.
This year, for our unexpected sudden family vacation, someone recommended for us to go to Las Vegas. When I had visited this city in the past when I was in business field, Las Vegas was a city filled with gambling and prostitution, and was a city of decadent pleasures. If I knew that someone planned a family vacation or a honeymoon to that city, I tried with my best to dissuade them from going there. This is why I wondered at his recommendation, thinking “what city for my family vacation?” But after I listened to him, it began to make sense.
First, this city has been remade with a family focusand it was not a city like in the past. All the hotels are themed hotels so we did not have to walk much at all, and even if we had to walk, it was all inside. If there was a place my daughter wanted to visit, my wife could be left behind in the hotel room. And the Grand Canyon was close by so we could have an educational trip for my daughter about creative science. All these appealed to us so we decided to go there.
As we had heard, the city had really changed. Maybe because we stayed from Monday through Thursday, we did not see any decadent scenes anywhere as before and there were no sites that were embarrassing for us to look at. But my wife still had difficulty walking around in a strange place and it was not very easy for me to satisfy both persons. In the end, both my wife and daughters experienced hurt feelings and when they were discussing these, my daughter even shed some tears due to her frustrations.
I tried to explain from a point of a mediator. “To our family of three, our family trips require a little sacrifice on each of us. We did well until now, but we seem to have reached a limit so let’s make this our last trip.” But as we were concluding our discussions with each other, we began to discover that all three of us realized that the value of our family was very precious thing to us. The trip itself was a difficult endeavor for my wife, but she was willing to sacrifice for the family trip, and my daughter may have had more fun with her friends during a trip with them, but she thought the time with family was more precious. These facts made me very glad.
There were differences between us, but because we were a family, we did not give up and tried our best to be considerate with each other as we were finishing the trip. It was a trip to confirm the value of family once more with each other.
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