Throwback Thursday: Favorite Summer Vacation

It's another edition of Throwback Thursday!!!!!! Don't you just love looking back into my childhood? Good times. 

Today's Topic: Favorite Summer Vacation

In all honesty, my family didn't go on many vacations in the summer. When I was really young we did Disney World and a few others, but I don't really remember them outside of photos. It was hard to go on vacation because my dad was a funeral director and you can't really plan when people die in advance... Then when my sister and I got older we were really busy in the summers with marching band and such, so we didn't have time for many vacations. 

I also traveled a lot in high school for church, choir, and band. For youth group we went to the National Youth Gathering in New Orleans one summer. Then in band and choir, over spring break I was able to go to Toronto, Hawaii, and Disney World. 

Technically, these weren't really "summer vacations" though. Besides, I don't have any digital photos of them to share with you and I don't feel like scanning any in.

However, we did start one little tradition for a few years with our girlfriends. I've talked about our little "sisterhood" a bit on the blog in the past. You can read about it here. My mom has a friend (Mariann) whom she has been friends with for forever. Mariann had two daughters, and my mom had two daughters, and we're all the same ages. It's pretty convenient. (I feel like my mom has a story about a guy who asked them once if they planned it that way...) When I got to about high school age, we decided to start taking weekend girl trips together over the summer. Nothing big, just to another place an hour or two away for a night or so. A mall, a nice hotel, movies, and something "touristy" were always on the list. 

Kind of like a stay-cation... but not.

I would show you pictures of all of these little weekend girl trips, but only the last couple years we did it are digital. Yup, the other photos were all film and are stuck in photo albums. I feel old now.

However, here are some of when I was in college and we took our friends to Indiana where my mom grew up! 

In the grand tradition of being me (short and breakable) I had a glorious broken leg at the time. That always makes for a good trip, haha. I don't remember where this picture was taken exactly, but I do remember a lot of jokes about the creepy fake tree and the face it was making.

We loved going to movies all together. It was one of the staples of our friendship while we all were in high school. While in my mom's hometown, we went to a drive in movie to see the Superman movie. Yup.. it was that long ago.

Then here's a lovely photo of Julie (she's the one who comments everyday! Hey girl hey! She also wrote a guest blog that you can read here.) at the Ft. Wayne Zoo. I have no idea why we felt we needed to document her petting this random animal statue, but these were the only photos I could find of this trip. 

We also went to Naperville one year. (Basically the quintessential suburb of Chicago... but it was still fun.)

In Naperville they have a little historical village you can walk around in. Here is my sister experimenting with one of the hoops that was some sort of toy kids would play with. 

You can't go to a historical village without taking a picture in front of a covered wagon. I didn't have a broken leg that year, which was refreshing for a change.

After we graduated college, we all wanted to keep doing these trips, but life happens and things got really busy. Hopefully one of these days we'll do it again. Maybe even somewhere not in the midwest! 

What are some of your favorite vacation memories?