This summer, my family went to Mexico. We went to England. We renewed passports and booked flights and packed suitcases and found someone to take care of the dog. We crossed borders and time zones. We made memories I hope my kids will still be talking about when they’re grown.
And we drove 20 minutes to Rosemont.
I am not here to knock the Big Family Trip. I love a big trip. I will happily drag two small children through an airport in pursuit of a beautiful beach, an excellent meal, or a castle. But two of my favorite family adventures this summer lasted exactly one night.
There is a particular magic to the tiny family getaway. It barely requires an itinerary. It doesn’t eat up a week of vacation time or involve a spreadsheet or require you to spend three days afterward recovering from jet lag. You pack a couple of outfits, toothbrushes, pajamas, and the stuffed animals your children suddenly cannot sleep without, and you go.
Our first tiny vacation was to Rosemont, just outside Chicago, where we began at Dave & Buster’s, known in our family forevermore as “David and Buster’s.”
We didn’t try to squeeze in a million things. We played.
And played.
And played.
My kids tore through the arcade. I rediscovered my love of Skee-Ball. We ate fried shrimp and fish and chips and a very large salad in the name of vegetables. We devoured a key lime pie. Then we played some more.
Eventually we checked into the Hyatt Centric Chicago O’Hare, and I was reminded of one of the great truths of traveling with small children: You don’t necessarily have to take them somewhere extraordinary. Sometimes you just have to take them to a hotel.
To an adult, it was a comfortable, pretty hotel room with an elevated modern vibe. To my kids, it was an EVENT.
They arranged their stuffies on their beds. They investigated everything. There was a TV! In the room! We watched a little Bluey before getting dressed for what my kids refer to as a “fancy restaurant.”
Downstairs at CIMA, we ate the kind of dinner that made the whole evening feel like an occasion without requiring us to actually work very hard for the occasion. There were gorgeous summer tomatoes, bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with feta, a crunchy salad with romaine and cucumbers and olives, and fat garlicky shrimp over creamy mashed potatoes with excellent bread for dragging through the sauce.
The kids even had appetizers of their own, which delighted them. They weren’t tagging along on our dinner. They were having their own exprience. They were flowing.
For dessert, there was banana bread and a rhubarb ice cream I am still thinking about.
Then we went upstairs.
That was it.
No Uber back across the city with two exhausted children. No loading everyone into the car. No frantic bedtime routine. We walked upstairs, put on pajamas, climbed into our hotel beds, and went to sleep.
The next morning, we ate eggs and French toast and did a little outlet shopping. There was perhaps a meltdown involving some highly coveted Squishies. Even on vacation, apparently, we remained a family.
And then we went home.
Our other one-night adventure required a slightly longer drive.
While visiting my husband’s family in England, we drove about two hours to stay overnight at Chester Zoo with some of our kids’ cousins. Because we live an ocean away from them, cousin time is precious—and usually crammed into bigger family visits where there are lots of people and lots happening at once.
For one night, though, we got to disappear together.
We saw giraffes and chimpanzees and a red panda, which was a personal highlight. We managed to spot the tiger, an animal that apparently has no obligation to appear simply because you’ve traveled all this way to see it. The kids got the thrill of being at the zoo before and after regular visiting hours.
And the adults got to sit on a porch with a cocktail, looking out over the animals of Africa.
Again: one night.
That was what struck me. These trips were special precisely because we didn’t ask that much of them—or ourselves.
There is so much pressure around family travel to make it worth it. If you’re buying the plane tickets and taking the vacation days and schlepping the car seats and remembering the chargers and finding someone to feed the dog, you want to SEE THINGS. You want to maximize. You want everyone to appreciate this incredible opportunity you have painstakingly arranged for them.
And, unfortunately, your children remain children.
They get tired. They fight. They want a snack while standing next to the lunch you just bought them. They become emotionally devastated by the denial of a Squishy.
A one-night vacation doesn’t have to carry all that weight.
You can do one or two things and enjoy them. You can let the hotel room itself be an attraction. You can order dessert. You can stay somewhere close enough that getting there isn’t half the battle. You can wake up the next morning, have pancakes, do one more thing, and go home.
Of course, a night in a hotel is still a luxury. It costs money and requires planning, and it isn’t accessible to every family. But I love the idea of expanding our definition of a getaway downward instead of always upward. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a week. Maybe it doesn’t have to involve a plane. Maybe you don’t have to go very far at all.
Maybe the point is simply to leave regular life for a minute.
Our big trips this summer were wonderful. I’m grateful for every castle, beach, airplane ride, and stamp in our passports.
But when I think about what I want more of next summer, I keep coming back to those little nights away: my kids setting up their stuffed animals in an unfamiliar hotel room, cousins running around the zoo together, me playing Skee-Ball like I had nowhere else in the world to be.
Sometimes one night is enough to make ordinary life feel far away.
And sometimes that’s enough of a vacation.
