Surviving Your First Vacation as a Couple

My husband's and my vacation styles were originally widely divergent. His original preference was to sleep on the beach and do nothing else but eat and drink even though he came from family that moved and traveled often due to being in the retail business. I on the other hand came from a family that was constantly mobile since we lived in Northern California and spent up to one third of the year in the San Francisco area with family for the various vacation periods during the year, Christmas, Easter and all summer.

His travel was segregated between business and pleasure. Ours was always combined, since we came from farming families and carnival people who tended to combine as many projects into the same trip as possible.

Our first vacation together was our honeymoon and it became the blueprint for all of our trips and vacations. The destination was decided by the location of the airline we were flying out on. We were flying out on World Airline which was flying out of Oakland, California, because of their famous $100 flights to Hawaii. We stayed in Oakland and spent most our time in San Francisco and Oakland which are just a bridge apart.

San Francisco is a mutually favorite city for us, so it was an easy choice for us. We sat down and noted our budget, time and places that each of us really wanted to visit. Then we eliminated the places that were too time consuming or squandered too much of our budget and places that we couldn't agree on together. Then we each
chose several top personal choices that the other could live with and put them on the list in the order of availability, proximity, traffic flow, and amount of time needed.

Fortunately for us, many of our choices were mutual and those that weren't were often that way because the other hadn't experienced that venue yet. For instance my husband had never ridden the cable cars or been on Lombard, or Fisherman's Wharf or China Town and I'd never been to Gumps or Abercrombi and Fitch.

Our approach to the trip was such a success that we returned the next year for our first anniversary, which was also a success due to our advanced planning and preparation.

All of our trips have always had a practical as well as a fun aspect. In the first seven years of our marriage we'd moved 12 times and have lived in three states, so the majority of our vacations were also scouting trips to new locations.

It's no surprise that our succeeding moves were combined with vacation. We'd browse across the country or state and explore the new places we encountered as we moved to our location. We always used the moves as an opportunity to also explore new territory as we moved toward our new home.

Out of these came the mission trips, which are a combination of business and fun. All of our trips have become business trips and the majority of them are usually combined with fun, family and friends.

For your trip, agree to a list of priorities such as:

1. Have a similar focus:

Choose a mutual destination that both of you want to go to. This needs to be somewhere that both of you equally want to go to.

2. Choose a similar goal:

Agree on a mutual main purpose or reason for the trip. What do you expect to get out of the trip. What do you want to do and see. Is it to be a camping, beach, sightseeing, family visit or amusement park trip?

3. List your priorities for the trip and what you want to accomplish:

Is it to rest, to shop, to see family, to see things you haven't seen before or to share something that the other hadn't seen yet? This helps to set realistic expectations and a good possibility of satisfying them.

4. Exercise a willingness to mutually compromise:

You both need to make up a list of what you expect to do. Then considering the time, distance and budget limitations, choose your top choices only. Don't insist on all of your choices unless they're the same on both lists. Which they often are for us, so that makes it easy to accomplish most our lists.

5. Make a list of target locations that you intend to visit:

Be specific about your choices and also have alternate choices just in case the first ones aren't available. Also check as many of them out before you go so that you can know whether they're still available or if there are special conditions attached to them due to some situation that has arisen or special deals are available that you would like to take advantage of.

It would also be good to make whatever advanced reservations you can or to acquire whatever coupons or discounts you can for whatever venues you choose to visit. By doing this you can save a lot of time and possibly money at your destination which you can use for enjoying you trip instead of making arrangements and spending more money.

I was on quite a few family trips, as a child, that ended up being family feud time because expectations weren't addressed or met, either because they weren't recognized and put on the list or because there was no advanced preparation and either the venue wasn't available or some other situation was present.

I've found that advance preparation helps the trip to go more smoothly, to give us the opportunity to take advantage of more things in the time available to enhance the expectations for an enjoyable time and it gives everyone a say in the time spent and reasonable expectations that have a good chance of being fulfilled and thereby increasing the enjoyability and satisfaction quotient.