What's the best vacation you ever had?

Each month members of the Etsy Bloggers Team participate in a Blog Carnival.  This month, one of the questions asked is"What's the best vacation you ever had?"

As I sit here writing this I am on the Big Island of Hawaii where I have had the wonderful opportunity to avoid our Wisconsin winter and get a major shot of Vitamin D...something lacking for a large part of the year where I'm from.  Three months in Hawaii has been absolutely wonderful...I wouldn't have traded it for anything. However,  I have to say that the best vacation I ever had was actually many years ago.  It was that earlier vacation that made this current vacation possible.

Back in the late 1980's I was working for an air freight forwarding company as a Sales Manager.  At the time I got two weeks vacation a year.  My husband and I decide to take a weeks vacation and go camping in Maine.  About halfway through that week, I knew I wasn't ready to go back to work, so I called the company and said I am going to take my second week of vacation now, rather then save it for later in the year.

That vacation changed our life!

 It is so easy to get caught up in our daily lives that we forget, as my mom used to say 'to stop and smell the roses'.   Once you have 'smelled the roses' it can be life altering.  That's what happened to us.

It was October.  The leaves were at their peak. Maine could not have been more gorgeous!  While on that trip, sleeping in our tent in beautiful Baxter State Park we decided that we needed  a major change in our lives.  We both realized that it was time that was most important to us rather then wealth or material goods.  This was a huge realization.

We decided to sell our house, put all of our belongings in storage and travel for one year.  That one year turned into four, during which time we did a lot of extraordinary things.   When we finally did settle down again, we continued to live a very simple life....living below our means and choosing our time over $$.

Which brings me back to Hawaii.  Had we not made the decisions all those years ago to live a different kind of life, we would never have been able to be here right now.

I think the moral of this story is to choose the life that you want, make a commitment to that choice and then take the steps...one at a time...to make that reality happen.  That is what we did and so I choose camping in Maine all those years ago as the catalyst for changing my life and the best vacation I ever had!