Our First Family Vacation: South Haven, Michigan
For our first vacation with Clay, we spent four days last week at a beautiful Airbnb in South Haven, Michigan with my parents — and boy was it needed. After four years of not taking a week off of work, needless to say, feelings of exhaustion and burnout had caught up to me far too long ago. Dropping everything and packing up felt foreign and out-of-practice, but my three-page packing list served me well (hello, Monica Geller) as we loaded up our rented minivan and headed north for a few days.
Side note: typically when I travel, these blog posts are filled with countless pictures of everything we did and everywhere we went. However, instead of having a camera in one hand like I always did in the past, I had a baby instead, so the amount of photo documentation is much different this time than in years past. However, I gained far more than a compilation of beautiful pictures, which I’ll explain in a sec.
Anyway, this was only my second time ever visiting Michigan and my first time in South Haven. For our first trip with a baby, we wanted to stay somewhat close to home within driving distance — mainly so we could pack whatever we felt we needed to feel comfortable and prepared without the space restrictions that flying would bring. Leading up to the trip, I’m not going to lie, I was pretty nervous about how it would go. I was so worried that Clay wouldn’t sleep and that the total change of scenery and schedule adjustments would make her cranky and irritable, which wouldn’t be fun for anyone. I felt like I couldn’t even get excited about the trip because these worries overshadowed everything. However, to our delight, Clay slept amazingly and proved to be so adaptable in a new environment. I was thrilled!
We spent our days walking around the town, eating at local restaurants, visiting shops, hanging out at the house together and enjoying the beautiful views. We drove to Saugatuck one day (only 30 minutes away), where Justin and I visited back in 2018 for a blog/travel collaboration, which was really cool to relive some of those fond memories. The weather ended up being even cooler than I anticipated, so all the cute outfits I had planned/packed for Clay and I had to be revised, and the limited colder weather pieces I did manage to bring had to be washed and re-worn. We actually ended up losing power our first night there due to storms, which was likely the culprit of the lower temps for most of the week. Nonetheless, we did get a gorgeous, sunny and warm afternoon to go to the beach, which is when these pics were taken.
Shop our beach outfits here.
I felt so stressed in the moment trying to get as many beach pictures of Clay as I could, not knowing if/when we’d ever get the opportunity to do it again. I truly treated it like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (at least in her baby stage, which is fleeting) because I have no way of knowing if or when we’ll be back on a beach again. We had to have looked absolutely insane frantically running around, jumping and dancing to get Clay to smile and laugh. What can I say though, the results proved to be worth it! 😉
A benefit of going years without taking a week off of work (yes, there is a benefit) is that you REALLY appreciate the time off when you finally do it. There was not a second that went by that I wasn’t incredibly grateful and joyful to be taking a break and spending time in a beautiful new place with some of the people I love most. Everything felt so much sweeter and I never want to wait that long to give myself a well-earned break ever again.
Fellow workaholics and frugal people reading this: take the damn trip. Use your hard-earned vacation days and stop giving your employers free labor (lol, AKA not using your allotted PTO). You deserve a break. You deserve to get away. You deserve experiences.
One last thing… this trip brought up some thoughts and emotions for Justin and I that we didn’t really expect. As our first family trip with a child of our own, it made us think about how we’d like to continue to provide experiences like this, much more frequently than every four years, for our daughter and our other future children. Without even discussing it, we were both simultaneously thinking about how much harder we want to work when we get home, as well as all of the areas of our life we want to improve on in order to be able to provide more for our children. We talked about how we no longer want to continue to skip out on traveling and making memories in the future simply because staying home and saving money is easier, because let’s be honest, it is. What was just supposed to be a family vacation turned into somewhat of a turning point for us, sharpening our focus on what we want our future to look like and the changes we need to make to get there.
As you can see, this isn’t much of a travel diary like my old posts, but more of a reflection of what I learned, including recognizing the mental and emotional value and clarity I gained from something as basic as a family vacation, something that people do all the time. I was also reminded that time is so incredibly precious. Not only was this our first time traveling with Clay, a gift in itself, I had the pleasure of seeing the pure joy in my parents each day as they experienced new things through the eyes of their first grandchild, whom they absolutely adore. This trip was one that I will forever cherish.