The List

 Ah, yes. 2018 is over and a fresh start is upon us. It's easy to get caught up in all the New Year hype and we're guilty of it. As I've mentioned in previous posts, we have some big things coming up for this year, however, these trips eat up a lot of vacation time and tend to hit the pocket book significantly. What that means is that we need other things to do on the weekends in between our larger trips. So what is the first step in planning a year of adventures? You make a list, of course. 
  Thanks to our family doing the home school thing, we happened to have a large white board set up in our living room. Yes, this is weird, but it works for us. We erased the math problems to make room for the important things and we started naming all of the places that we would like to visit and the things we wanted to do. Nothing was off limits but we wanted to focus on things that we could do near home and on short notice. It only took us fifteen minutes and we ended up filling the board. The only reason we stopped was because Misty's hand got tired of writing and we had people coming over to plan our Moab trip coming up in April. After people looked over the list something interesting happened. People started commenting on some of the things on our list. Some had been to places on the list, others wanted to go to some locations. The best part was when they actually started adding things to the list. Why? Because adventure is contagious, adventure is fun.
  We're finding that the hardest part is deciding where to go first. We'll sort that out later. The thing I want to do is encourage all of you to make your own list. Don't worry, you can use a piece of paper if you don't have a big, white, dry erase board. Gather up the family and just brainstorm. Let them say whatever they want and you can write it down. After ten or fifteen minutes you'll have a great list of activities that you can enjoy with your family and maybe you'll learn a little bit more about what your kids are interested in doing and go ahead and scratch the really crazy ideas off the list later. 
  So for 2019 it looks like our family has a lot of National Parks and hiking trips coming up. Of course, I will be incorporating a lot of photography into those trips because that's what I like to do and it can be done anywhere. I suppose that whatever we don't get around to this year can roll over to the list for 2020 but I hope there aren't that many leftover. 
 So what are you waiting for? Grab your family and get to making your list because 2019 is already ticking away. 

Brandan