They say that the difference between a trip and a vacation is that a trip is with the kids – and a vacation is without.
Well, I write this at 6:00am, ahead of the last day of a three day family trip to the north of Israel.
And “they” know what they are talking about. I’m ready for a vacation. 🙂
We’re all having a great time. I’m just differentiating.
We hiked across the top of Mount Tabor where, right there on the path, a cow and her two calfs challenged us for right of way. They gave us city slickers a bit of a fright as we weren’t sure how they would behave.
In a nine-seat Rodius, we drove a narrow, pothole studded back-road looking for the fabled “Wonder Road.” This is a strip where while driving downhill, you put your car in neutral – and it starts to roll backwards up the hill! (I’ll tell you the secret here on the blog.)
The eight of us rode through the gorgeous Hula Lake Park nature reserve on a six seater golf cart. Hundreds of millions of birds pass through this site each year while migrating from Europe to Africa and back. In a bid to win “Dad of the Year” I gave each kid a turn at the wheel.
But it is a trip. Not a vacation.
If it were a vacation, we’d have sent the older kids to your house and found a nanny to watch the baby.
Instead, like many nights, she ended up in my bed for a good part of the night.
And so, I woke up at 5:30am this morning – to write and review some transcripts for a first-class client in the UK. This after the baby woke me up at 5:15am. The alarm clock merely confirmed what I already knew.
It’s chilly – 51 degrees (11 Celsius) here on the back patio. The air, and the view is fresh. I’ve got a cup of hot coffee, some chocolate and mellow jazz, courtesy of my iPhone.
All around me is the noisy, incessant chirping and fluttering of hundreds of birds – every one of whom must have slept very, very well to have all that energy. A cat strolls through the garden pretending to hear nothing.
Shayna Roth, my operations manager, has a proven, reliable system for training her kids to sleep through the night. And she tells me they all do – from three months. In our family, it usually takes two years or more.
“We value sleep in our family,” she once told me with a laugh.
It occurs to me that I also have a proven, reliable system that helps people sleep well at night. I’ve got a fantastic system for creating a steady, consistent, predictable flow of ideal clients.
When your talents are being utilized for what you’re good at and what you love – and you’re paid well for it – you tend to sleep very well at night.
Unless you have an infant in your bed.
Do you have any good family trip stories? Add your comments below.
Dov Gordon
