Vacation

Vacation is probably the greatest thing that man has ever invented. I just got back from an absolutely amazing vacation. My family and I visited Miramar Beach, Florida. Miramar Beach is about 20 minutes from Destin, which you may have actually heard of.

Driven straight, it’s about 13 hours from our home in San Antonio to our destination. With stops, it turned out to be right about 16 hours each way. Let’s just say, that’s a lot of time to spend in a Mini Cooper. With three other people and enough luggage for a week.

Packing light

With the aforementioned four people in a tiny car, packing light isn’t just a nice thing to do, it’s absolutely necessity. Somehow we managed to fit everything we needed into a suitcase that just barely fit in the boot¹, with a few extra things behind the front seats. If you’re a serial over-packer, one long trip in a Mini will fix that in a hurry.

Gadgets on the trip

I no longer have a notebook computer, having dropped it in favor of an iPad 2. My plan for this trip was to bring my iPad to handle any work that just couldn’t wait until after my vacation. At the very last minute, I opted to ditch the iPad too. That’s right, I went on a seven day trip with an iPhone as my only computer.

And I survived.

Indeed, I often left the iPhone in the hotel room when we went out. It served as a camera more than any other function, but my wife’s DSLR was doing the heavy lifting in that department anyway. Fortunately none of my websites exploded on my trip, or patching things up may have been touchy. The lack of reasonable WiFi would have further complicated things².

A week without gadgets was… nice

One week without the distraction of shiny gadgets was pretty great. I was able to enjoy the company of my family without distractions constantly pulling me in different directions. The lack of having to work was the biggest relief, of course. If I didn’t have to work for a living, I could see myself having more gadget-free time. The gadgets do help with work, though.

Beautiful

Again and again, I caught myself thinking how beautiful Miramar Beach is. Pure white sand, crystal-clear water, fish swimming by as you’re playing in the ocean. When viewed from afar, the water is a gorgeous green color… that’s why they call it the Emerald Coast.

Did you really think I wasn’t going to include at least one picture?

This is the view at sunset from our balcony. This shot was one of the few taken with my iPhone. Stunning, isn’t it?