Bad Vacation? Treasure the Memory.

A couple of weeks ago, I convinced my family to drive to the White Mountains and hike up to Lonesome Lake hut on the Appalachian Mountain Club trail. Our plan was to sleep at the hut and do some day hikes, maybe see a moose and the last of the autumn foliage.
“Won't you be cold?” my mother asked.
“It'll be great,” I assured her. “How cold can it get in October?”
Pretty cold, as it turns out. We hiked through freezing rain, hail, and even snow at the highest elevation. We couldn't see more than a hundred feet in front of us at times because we were literally hiking through clouds. The trails were slippery and treacherous, too—wherever there wasn't mud, we were skidding on icy rocks.
It was definitely one of those trips that will go down in our family's Vacation Hall of Fame.
We've had a lot of those vacations. There was that foolish train trip to Florida, for instance, where our kids proved to be too young to contentedly look out the window; their idea of fun was playing tag in the aisles. We had another trip to Florida where two kids got strep throat and a third came down with a stomach bug; every time he vomited, he announced, “I tossed my cookies again!” causing the other kids to want a share of those treats.
Then there was our ill-fated trip to Washington, D.C. Determined to show our children the wonders of the cherry trees in bloom and the Smithsonian, we arrived and realized we'd forgotten a stroller for the baby. We managed to buy one, but that mistake cost an entire day. The cherry trees weren't in bloom because winter had lingered, which also meant that the hotel pool was frozen over and out of commission.
Oh, and let's not forget that trip to jolly England, where we rented a restored mill house in the countryside and it rained every single day we were there—so much rain that we finally bought the kids Wellingtons and hiked in it anyway, for fear that otherwise we'd die of cabin fever.
Ah, and the trip to Spain! We brought along my mother as well as all five kids on that vacation, which meant that we had to rent a nine-passenger van—not an easy vehicle to navigate on twisty cobblestone streets through Spanish villages. To make matters worse, they gave us a red one. We might as well have added a neon sign to it, proclaiming, “Stupid Loud American Tourists Here.”
At one point, we drove into the center of one small town and had to back all the way out again because we couldn't turn the van around. The mayor's widow, dressed in her black weeds, her gray hair coming loose in a fountain from her bun, helped direct us, screaming at all of the village men to move their scooters out of our way. Meanwhile, one of our kids (a different one) was carsick enough to toss his cookies, causing the others to shriek.
“That was an awesome trip, Mom,” my son declared after returning from the White Mountains, as we stuffed soggy clothes into the washing machine.
It was, it was. I can say that now that I've thawed out.
Here's the thing: bad vacations are the real family keepsakes, because you survive them together (ideally). You have to play games or tell jokes, you have to get each other through the hail or the flat tire or the flu. Surviving a bad vacation as a family requires everyone to step up and show determination, loyalty, and yes, even courage. Blue skies, sunshine, and a white beach are all pleasant, but what fun is that kind of vacation to reminisce about later?
Remember this, as you're packing up to go away for the holidays this year.

Do College Costs + Retirement = Canada?

“So how long do you plan to keep working?” asked a friend recently, after he'd waxed poetic about his own crafty retirement plan (take his pension at 65, sell his Massachusetts house and move to Florida, play tennis year-round, live happily ever after).
“Um. Forever?” I suggested. “I plan to die at my keyboard.”
I wasn't joking. Between the economic free fall and putting kids through college, my husband and I will be working for the rest of our lives.
That's why we made an offer on a house in Canada yesterday.
Why Canada? I've loved Prince Edward Island, Canada, ever since I started vacationing there some fifteen years ago. The island is gorgeous (see photos at http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=yfp-t-892-s&va=prince+edward+island+canada), laid back, friendly, green-minded, and there's fiddle music everywhere you go. It felt like home the first moment I hiked the red dirt roads between flowering potato fields.
“Yes, that's fine, but what about the winter?” various friends countered, so I tried traveling to PEI then, too, and found other things to love, like the ice fishing shacks stacked like bright Legos along Malpeque Bay and the snow tornadoes rising like long-skirted fairies in the fields.
But I digress. We made an offer on a house located in the remote eastern corner of PEI because there's no way that my husband and I can afford to retire here in the U.S. We haven't seen the inside of the house – there was no realtor around, and we had to leave the next day – but we peered into the windows from the rotted deck, and we'd seen the listing sheet online. We know that this farmhouse supposedly has five bedrooms and two bathrooms.
We also know that the house is being sold “as is.” That's a little scary, because Canadian realtors tend to be honest to a fault. When I surf www.mls.ca with these simple criteria: “Prince Edward Island, $25,000 to $75,000 price range, two bedrooms or more,” I regularly read descriptions like these: “This house has been neglected. Needs a strong arm.” Or, “Small country home that has been left vacant for a few years. Needs a real clean up. The property has no source of heat. Had a wood stove and previous owner took it.”
With this particular house, the phrase that struck me was this one: “Being sold with furnishings and other items too numerous to mention.” What happened to the owner, I wondered, that he would flee or fade away without emptying his house?
Finally, I called our realtor, Anne. She's a trim, no-nonsense woman who used to make her living fishing for lobster; last summer, she showed me a few houses while wearing knee-high green rubber boots. “I don't know where the old fella went that lived there,” she said, “but I can call his nephew down the road and find out more if you're interested.”
That's how the island works: if you know one person, you know six, without any degrees of separation. When Anne called back, though, she couldn't tell me much. Apparently this was an estate sale, someone's children selling it for someone who had died. The “old fella,” presumably.
“What about the septic system?” I asked.
“Doubt anybody knows much about that,” Anne said.
“How do I know if I'd have to replace it?”
“Guess you'd have to just dig it up,” she said. “But I wouldn't recommend it. You might want to leave it be.”
“You mean we'd just buy the house, and hope for the best?” I asked.
“That's about the size of things,” she said. “If it fails, you'd know it.”
This did not sound promising. On the other hand, if the old fella hadn't been using the septic system in a while, everything probably had time to drain.
So we made the offer, and now we're waiting to see if it was accepted. We'll find out this Friday. Meanwhile, I'm biting my nails.
Despite the fact that we love PEI – and this house, in particular, with its charming century-old architecture, peaceful farmland views, and proximity to our favorite beach – I know that this plan is more whimsical than logical. For starters, we have no money. Like so many people, we were nearly flattened by the economic downturn. My husband was laid off twice and two of the start-up companies he joined went under. We struggled to stay afloat as our oldest child started college and we paid health care costs out of pocket for one year, then a second. We finally decided to sell our house and buy a smaller one.
That's when the real estate market crashed. Our first buyer pulled a runner after we'd gotten locked into buying that smaller house, so we ended up with a bridge loan for a year, until we found another buyer. Goodbye, savings. Hello, credit cards.
With no spare cash under our mattress, we'll now have to dip into our retirement funds to finance the purchase of this house. Yet another bad idea: Why take a 10 percent hit, rather than wait until we're old enough to pull the money out without having to pay taxes on it?
Our only arguments in favor of doing so are admittedly weak: our retirement funds are stagnating with the limp stock market, making us think real estate can't be worse, and the PEI house we want to buy is one that we can easily imagine loving full-time. Plus, it's for sale right now at an asking price that's half of its assessed value.
“Prince Edward Island is too far away,” another friend complains. “Why can't you find a retirement spot closer to home?”
Where could we go? Ohio? Pennsylvania? Tennessee? Even those states are more expensive. We're not alone in thinking that Canada is the answer. Far from it: the number of U.S. citizens choosing to live in Canada hit a 30-year high recently (http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2101397c-fe7c-4adf-a2d1-8665cb29ac66&k=0
The last time Canada saw such an enormous influx of U.S. citizens was during the political turmoil of the Vietnam war. Now, many are choosing Canada both for economic and political reasons. Our own reasons are simple: we love Canada, and the cost of living in the U.S. has killed us. Once our kids are grown, we imagine eventually selling this house in New England, which is about the same size as the one on PEI but worth ten times more. We'll have red dirt roads and fiddle music, potato fields and freshly steamed mussels to keep us happy. We'll still be working until we drop to pay back our debts. But we can freelance remotely for the same U.S. companies from Canada – my husband as a software engineer, me as a writer – while we make goat cheese, have a few hens of our own, and grow our own vegetables, all without a crippling mortgage and punishing health care costs.
It's a crazy dream. But it's less of a fiscal nightmare than what we've experienced here.
Or am I missing something? Should we back out of this house deal now, while there's still time to be sensible?