Every year my aunt rents a house on the ocean in Topsail Island, North Carolina for two weeks in the summer. My mom likes to take us down there for a week or so since it is one of the only times in the year she can see her sister and it is a cheap vacation for my family since my aunt often refuses to let my mom help pay. One year stands out in my mind because the week after we went straight down to Florida to visit Disney World and Universal Studios. I think I was in middle school still and I was really excited the weeks coming up to the vacation. We drove from Minnesota to North Carolina, which is about a 13 hour drive. We hadn’t been able to come out the year before so it had been a while since we had seen my cousins and I remember being so excited to hang out with them. They were all a couple years older and I remember thinking I was so cool for getting to hang out with them and that they seemed to enjoy the company of my younger siblings and I. We got to spend a week just goofing off on the beach with my cousins which was a ton of fun. This vacation always sticks out to me because usually my dad likes to plan vacations where we have an agenda of things to do, and events to go see and there is never time to just sit and relax, which I believe is the mark of a true vacation. To be able to just spend a week swimming and lounging on a beach was heaven. Of course the next week, when we went to Disney/Universal, my dad had his list of things we had to go see. It was still a lot of fun though, and we went right as the new Harry Potter world was opening. My brother and I were huge Harry Potter fans and I remember getting a wand and using it at certain places around the park that were rigged so it looked like you were actually using magic. The lines for everything were super long but we pretty much just goofed off the entire time and so waiting wasn’t so bad. I had just discovered that I liked roller coasters and so my brother and I tried to go on every ride at least twice. I usually hang out with my sister, so being able to hang out with my brother for most of the week was fun and we got to bond over Harry Potter and rides, since my sister wasn’t that into it. The whole vacation was so much fun I didn’t even mind the 22 hour ride home. Although I think we might have stopped somewhere in Tennessee for the night. I think the reason this vacation was so fun and exciting is because it was different from what we normally do. My parents are big outdoorsy people and so usually our vacations are spent in a tent camping somewhere. I like to camp but it was nice to do something different, like stay in a resort amusement park or just lounge around on a beach for a week. It was definitely one of my favorite vacations