Foregoing The Sand

Well, we held firm to last year's prediction and elected not to participate in the annual family pilgrimage to Aruba. Ultimately it came down to trying to live one year (or at least most of one year) within the confines of the school vacation calendar, but the decision turned out to be prescient because 2010 began with an explosion of activity at work, and had we booked the trip I'm not sure the girls wouldn't have been going alone.

Talked to my parents yesterday morning about 7 a.m. while they were waiting at the gate to board their outbound flight. Other relatives are already down there, including my 90-year-old grandmother, who swore up and down that last year was going to be it for her, too. The lure of the beach and open-air bingo ultimately won out, I guess. Other family members will join early this week.

I'll confess to a few visits to the Playa Linda Webcam over the last couple of days, just to get a real-time sense of what we're missing. For a more nostalgic sense I only have to click through some previous posts.

Ava is about to turn seven and this would have been our seventh year in a row, she - alone among us - actually broke down in tears over the fact that we weren't going. Gwen looked into flights as recently as a couple a weeks ago in response to that blast of emotion and a general sense of aspirational curiosity, but it never got beyond the land of "wouldn't it be nice?"

It would have been nice. Maybe next year.