Life Inside Our Bubble

The whole idea behind this blog is to encourage you to Leave the Bubble – to step away from the everyday, explore something out of the ordinary, try something new and unknown, and make the most of every opportunity that comes your way. For us to get here, we had to realize that we had built our own bubble around us. This post is to describe what the inside of our bubble looked like and to describe what made us realize we wanted to experience more.

I mentioned in my About Me page that for a dozen years or so our family had slipped into a rhythm with our vacations in our safe little part of the world. Being from Birmingham, Alabama, that meant we would travel four hours to the beach, four hours to the mountains, or two to three hours to either Nashville, Chattanooga or Atlanta. We aren’t gamblers so casinos aren’t our thing, but for those who are that meant trips to either Philadelphia, Tunica or Biloxi, all in Mississippi, to take their chances against the house. Common, safe, predictable, and familiar. It was all the same climate, all the same people, all the same foods and all the same activities. If we stretched it and had a little more time and money, we would take in Walt Disney World. A little farther away but it truly was a real getaway for us.

At any rate, I went back and looked at our trips for the last few years. Here’s what it looked like beginning in 2010.

2010

• Visited the Animal Safari and Callaway Gardens in Georgia
• Panama City Beach, Florida where we went deep sea fishing and played at the beach and pool
• Visited the Huntsville Space and Rocket center in Huntsville, AL

2011

• Panama City Beach, Florida where we went deep sea fishing and played at the beach and pool
• Visited the Animal Safari and Callaway Gardens in Georgia

2012

• Disney World for Spring Break
• Disney World again in July to visit Magic Kingdom and Disney water parks plus Wet-n-Wild
• Panama City Beach, Florida where we went deep sea fishing and played at the beach and pool
• Lake Lanier in Georgia during Christmas break

2013

• Visited Disney Land, California Adventure, toured Hollywood, took a whale watching trip to see dolphins (!) and went to Knott’s Berry Farm
• Visited Chicago – we didn’t visit much as we went to see my step-son graduate from Navy boot camp but we took advantage of what time we had
• Visited ICE! In Nashville, Tennessee during Christmas break

Notice a trend here? Everything we did in 2010, 2011 and 2012 centered around Alabama, Georgia and Florida. But in 2013 we seemed to break out of that mold. We saw three different states – California, Illinois and Tennessee – and did something new each time. What changed that year that was so different than years before? I think it was three things:

1. There was necessity – Navy bootcamp is only held in Chicago, and you only graduate from there once.
2. There was novelty – While Disney World is much bigger than Disney Land, the California park is the original and had attractions and lands that simply don’t exist in the Florida parks.
3. There was nostalgia – The ICE! attraction in Nashville is hosted at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, where the former Opryland theme park stood and I visited as a child.

While none of these three alone would push us outside the bubble, they did begin to make us feel really small the longer we spent inside the bubble. I’ll be spending time in the coming weeks recapping these trips in great detail. Just going through the pictures to prepare for this post has stirred me to begin planning yet another trip! In the next post, I’ll describe how 2013 became a turning point in our travel lives and what happened in the years since once we decided to Leave the Bubble.