Unless you visit the same spot for vacation every year, traveling can bring up some nerves. Am I choosing the right spot? What will we do? How will we get there? Where will we stay? What do we need? You research, make choices, but you actually don’t know what you’re going to get.
That’s how every trip I’ve ever taken has felt. So, when planning a trip for me and my son this summer, I chose to take a different approach-the Dani approach. I didn’t do much research. I knew that I wanted to go to the beach with him, that I didn’t want to pay a lot of money and that I just wanted to not plan much, but see what we wanted to do each day.
My Dani approach made him-and maybe some others-kind of nervous. I wanted to camp, but he wanted to stay somewhere. So. I looked at hotels along the Outer Banks, only to realize that they were fairly expense per night.
After exhausting nearly every other option, I decided to look into Airbnb for this trip. I have used Airbnb for several other trips without the kids, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Not only were the rooms/homes clean with great amenities, but the people I’ve stayed with have been so friendly and willing to help.
When I told my son that I booked a room on Airbnb for our trip to the Outer Banks, he was not too excited about staying in someone else’s home. He said, “What if they come in our room and kill us?”
This statement really made me sad. The truth is that we are raising a generation of people who are scared to do anything outside of the norm or outside of a posh lifestyle. I don’t think I meant to do this to my children. I tried to expose them to many different types of people, to give them the wisdom to see that all people, no matter what, are people just like them and that there is a lot of good in the world. I don’t focus much on the bad things that can happen, but somehow my kids are aware of all the dangers in the world.
The sad thing is that fear grips minds in a way that people are no longer allowed to see reality. Fear negates any possibility of goodness or hope.
Instead of giving into his fear, I decided that on this trip, we are going to live outside of the box and venture into Dani’s world where we stretch limits and focus on what is right with the world.
When we pulled into the home we are staying at, my son stayed in the car for a while. I got out, talked to our host, took a tour, then came back to get him. He was excited to see that this family surfs and has two daughters and that there are kids playing all around the neighborhood. It’s actually much like Mahomet without the farmland.
I enjoy waking up to the girls playing upstairs. When I go up, they say, “It’s our visitor!” And my heart bursts open because these two young girls are learning that it is okay to open our doors (for a fee…), invite people into our home and share our lives with them. It’s really a priceless gift they are learning.
And I hope to find ways for my children to experience this, too. I’m not just talking about inviting friends over to the house (which they also aren’t thrilled about), but even continuing to stay in Airbnb’s instead of hotels so that they can learn people aren’t going to come kill us in our sleep. Instead, they will tell us about the best restaurants or let us cook in their kitchen, show us the best spots to see, provide us with clean linens and ask us questions about what our lives are like, too.
