Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Ken John Payne. In these last couple of weeks or so, I've been talking to two or three different parents about their vacation, their holiday plans, and two of them in particular really stood out for me, and I wanted to pass these on to you because they're gems. Both these parents, a couple, a two-parent home, and one single mum, had for now several years been visiting the same, one of them was a campsite and the other was a simple little holiday home.
And there were some real things in their stories that were similar. One of them was that when you go back to the same campsite, the same cabin, the same whatever it is, wherever you go, the children start really looking forward to going back there because you're, of course, you're only going to go back to a place that really works. Like, for one family, it was a cabin, there was some woods out back for the children to play and build huts and explore.
For another, there was a beach nearby the campsite and the campsite was a quieter, more family-based campsite, there were other kids that came there each year that they were really looking forward to seeing. There was one child in particular they'd made great friends with and they would write and send drawings backwards and forwards a couple of times through the year and they were so looking forward to seeing their campsite friends again. And it really struck me, the wisdom in what these parents had discovered.
They'd discovered that predictability on a yearly level, on a really big level, can really help kids in a big way transition into holiday mode, out of home mode. Because we think of holidays, right? We think of lovely times and yeah, we're going someplace, but it often can be rocky, you know, and kids get grumpy or they get overexcited or just a little uncooperative, perhaps, is what many of us will have noticed with kids and holidays over the years. And these parents had built up this place they would go back to.
They discovered it, it worked, and they went back there. Now, I spoke to both these parents and said, you know, how does that go for you? And they said, well, we could have gone further. We could have driven further and gone to this really amazing place somewhere we'd always wanted to see.
And but it would have meant like, you know, 10 hours or more in a car. And we just knew that was going to be really hard. Why put us through it? Why put the kids through it? And the other thing that they mentioned was they'd been one, this mom, a single mom, had been in a habit of of visiting this place and then that place and kind of exploring the world and taking her child to all these different places, far flung places, you know, that she could afford to visit.
It was all albeit on a bit of a budget, but they would pack the car up and off they would go to this place and that place. And what both sets of parents commented to me is that when they would go back to the same place, what they did was they kind of layered down and would discover little things in the place that they were going back to that they'd never known before. And this little thing and oh, that path leads out to a to an old lighthouse and oh, that path leads down to to a pond where you can see crabs and and all kinds of sea creatures.
And, you know, there's a there's a discovery that is of a more subtle nature that is just as valuable. In fact, it's it's perhaps more valuable because what it's doing is it's living life out on a child's scale rather than than being dragged here and there and having what we as adults can synthesize. We can cope with that.
We can arrive. We can cope with arriving at some busy airport in some perhaps it's even some place that doesn't speak English. And all the sights and sounds and smells are very different.
And we can cope with that. Well, barely. And our children on some level, we think, oh, children are resilient, they'll cope with it, too.
But actually, their senses don't adapt nearly as quickly as ours. And the and the sort of what they're able to take from those very busy, complicated situations at the very least loses three or four days, if not more, at the beginning of a vacation like that, just trying to come to terms with what's going on around them, all the different foods. Now, you could think, but that's good for them.
It's good for them to see different places, to try different foods. And I'm the first to agree. I love traveling.
I'm so pleased that my own kids are traveling now. But my opinion is that that there's a there's a lifetime of that awaiting children. What what we can give them is to give them the spirit of exploration.
And that spirit of exploration is just as alive when they discover the best place for driftwood. It's amazing. And they make all these these forms or the best little place that they they find all this bark falling off a tree that they can build the best secret cubby house.
And all that happens around the campsite, around the cabin that they've been visiting for years and years. It's that spirit of exploration that as they grow older, 15, 17, 19 into their early 20s, that's when they'll have that alive and they won't be tarnished, burnt out, or the traveling won't, in a sense, sit in their slightly sort of unconscious, that scary stuff. That's hard stuff.
Because when we travel with little children, that's the risk. I'm not saying that absolutely happens, but that that's the risk we run. We can mitigate against it being too scary by having our own family rhythms that we take with us, regardless if we're in Morocco or Melbourne.
You know, it there are things we can do, of course, of course, to help our children if we travel internationally. But in general, I was impressed with the stories these parents were telling about the about the the micro, the small little explorations that were going on for their children. And I couldn't help but think, wow, what a lovely, enjoyable holiday.
These parents had it wasn't fancy. It wasn't expensive, but they came back feeling more connected as a family. And that that's got to be a good thing.
OK, bye bye for now.
