vacations

When summer finally rolls around and you have some extra daylight on your hands, it’s a good time to escape to somewhere wet. It could be to a beach, lake, river or even a neighborhood pool. But my advice is to skip all the places everyone goes and try something new.

Notice to travelers: If your family is traveling with three generations, it’s a multigenerational trip, according to AARP. One third of travelers have made multi-gen travel a family tradition because it provides quality time together. I can relate.

I’m always surprised when I hear friends or colleagues say that their families rarely get together for reunions. That’s because between me and my husband, there are at least a couple to choose from every year. So we usually pick one and set aside some vacation time for it.

I love helping to spread the news about our AARP travel surveys, which explore people 45-plus and their vacation and travel habits. On more than one occasion, I find myself on the wrong side of the research, and I try to adjust. I had one of those self-adjustments this month around multigenerational travel. The most recent survey found that almost half of the folks surveyed planned to take a multigenerational trip in the next 12 months. I wasn’t in that category, so I decided to change that.

Zip-lining through a cloud forest. Yoga in a butterfly sanctuary. Local, freshly ground coffee strained through a burlap filter.

By Stephanie Miles

I have to admit I am one of those people who never uses all my vacation time each year. I feel like work will pile up when I'm gone, and I'll be more frazzled on my return than before I left. I'm not alone in leaving my vacation time on the table, either. The average worker in the U.S. gets 13 days of paid vacation a year, but only 57 percent of Americans use it all.

When my parents were frail and I was a family caregiver, I had no idea that there was a way I could have taken a trip with them. Beyond a trip to the doctor, that is! If we had gone on a vacation together,  I would have wanted time to myself or with my husband doing activities that were too arduous for them. I know, though, that I would have felt selfish and/or too exhausted to enjoy the trip.

Here we are rocking and rolling down the coast out of Seattle, not with a band, but aboard an Amtrak train that bumps, jumps, sways, jerks and hurtles all at the same time, knocking me around like a dog in a shipping crate thinking that at any moment I might go airborne.

Before you pack your swimsuit, check out the latest report card on U.S. beaches with the least and most pollution.