Posted 730 days ago
Reflections on living simply after a Montana vacation
by Pat Loughery
My family recently returned to our suburban Seattle home from a refreshing eight-day vacation in rural Montana. We spent time where I grew up from the time my parents moved from Los Angeles when I was three until I left for college at seventeen. We stayed in the house that my dad had built with my grandfather on our ten acres of land just a stone’s throw from the Clark Fork River Our property is seven miles from the small town of Trout Creek.
Those eight days for us were, like any good vacation is, very different from our regular lifestyle. By that, I mean it was relaxing. The contrast of leaving our suburban neighborhood and spending time in the country with no phone, no cell phone coverage, no Internet and a minimum 45-minute trip to the local grocery store shifted most of our normal patterns.
We did not have to live up to the pace of life in our neighborhood, and had no TV or work or study to keep up with. Instead, we spent most of our time outdoors. We swam and canoed almost every day. We bought fishing equipment and non-resident licences (a painful thing for me to do) and fished the waters. My daughter caught her first fish. We hiked trails. We rode bicycles wherever we went. We sat around the firepit, cooking hot dogs and s’mores. We played games and played music together. We visited old friends and neighbors. We saw deer, moose, turkeys and plenty of other wildlife, and the kids loved being able to run and yell and not worry about bothering next-door neighbors.
The vacation itself, after our last few vacations to Hawaii and the Caribbean coast to take advantage of a condo timeshare package through my wife’s company, was a simplification for us as well. We appreciated being able to drive instead of fly, and spend far less money than other vacations. And my daughter, whose last vacation was to an all-inclusive resort on the eastern coast of Mexico, said over and over, “This is the best vacation ever!” I beamed, because she was experiencing my lifestyle from the days that I was her age.
The hard part of vacations is, of course, realizing that they are not the real world for you. We know as a family that this simplicity doesn’t translate back into our workaday lifestyles, but there are a few things from our vacation that we’re trying to incorporate at home:
- Not driving—Because our trip to town for groceries or fishing supplies took a couple hours, we didn’t go often. We only used our SUV to carry the canoe down to the water, and enjoyed being on bicycles most of the time. We are using our bicycles at home now more than we did before vacation.
- Family—We enjoyed the time away from study and the Internet. I’m choosing to be more intentional about being off-line and being present with my family.
- Food choices—On our trip we were able to watch how sugary snacks impacted the kids, so as a family, we are simplifying our food choices at home.
- Regular camping—Recognizing that we live in an outdoor mecca (Seattle), we will camp more often. We will pick up Washington fishing licenses to see what we might be able to catch, and also to give us an excuse to explore new lakes and rivers in our area.
Reflecting on our relaxing week, I think the best thing that came out of our time was the contrast that we all felt between our “normal” lifestyle and our simpler “vacation” lifestyle. That feeling of displacement helped us to re-examine our everyday life together, and to make intentional choices to bridge the gap between the two worlds. By continuing to choose simplicity in little things, our lifestyles are slowly and surely changing.
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