Did I Take It Too Far?

Most genealogists would not dream of taking a vacation and not doing genealogy. We somehow manage to take our family vacation in an area that just happens to be the stomping ground of one ancestor or another. We visit old homesteads, graveyards, courthouses and civil war sites. We go to family reunions or visit distant cousins. Many of our vacations turn into genealogy research trips…or is it that our genealogy research trips turn into vacations. 

Whichever way it is traveling can be expensive so combining one with the other just makes sense…provided you can get your family to agree that visiting your 92 year old aunt in Missouri is almost as much fun as going to Disney World or the Grand Canyon. “Look sweetheart a probate record!”

But I think I took it a bit far when I combined my genealogy research trip with my honeymoon. 

I really can’t take all the blame. I wanted to go see the castles of Europe (very romantic) and my husband wanted to go to somewhere exotic like Fiji or Bali. Then HE suggested (see already it’s his fault) that we had never seen all of the United States we wanted to, so why didn’t we go see things like Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, Washington D.C., New Orleans, the Alamo and Parker Arizona and Grantsville, Utah.

 

(Did you hear tires screeching in your head just now…I did) What? Wait a minute…Parker Arizona? Grantsville, Utah?  

Well, now that we were both Parkers it seems we were going to stop at every Parker town, city, truck stop, whistle stop and feed store with the name Parker. (Or Grant since that is his first name) It got so bad that at one point I insisted on finding a Kim somewhere in the country and going there. 

Well folks, all we could find was a town called Kimberlina, and a few places named Kimberley or variations of that name. My name is Kim not Kimberley. Yap, even on my birth certificate. My father felt I would quit possibly get writers cramp from just my last name…he wasn’t going to tack a long name like Kimberley on the front end. Plus he had a huge crush on Kim Novak.  But there were no towns, cities, rock formations, travel lodges or parks called Kim. No, wait, that’s not completely true. We found a Kim, Texas. We went there. It used to be, sometime long ago, a whistle stop. All that was there was a train watering station.

So can you really blame me when our 1978 motor home chose to break down in Salt Lake City that I jumped on the two days of “down time” to spend my honeymoon at the Family History Library? (That was the fourth day of our honeymoon…the third had been spent on the salt flats with a flat tire…I had used the time to catch up on some data entry)

I think my new husband (a non-genealogist) knew he was in trouble when I asked to take a “little” detour. We were in Austin, Texas visiting my friend Pam; Bastrop and Taylor weren’t that far away. Just a “day trip.” If he didn’t know it then he probably did when the sheriff knocked on our door and told us we couldn’t camp in the cemetery. Not camping I assured him, just visiting with grandma and grandpa.

Nope…my genealogy honeymoon didn’t end there (and neither did the marriage.) We traveled on to Washington D. C. ……..OH MY GOSH!  The National Archives.  I can’t believe I’m going to admit that I did this…I can believe I did it…just not that I would admit it. I sent hubby off for a day of site seeing on his own while I spent a day in blissful heaven at NARA.

I wish I could say that that was the extent of it…but, no.

It was a six week honeymoon/genealogy extravaganza.

What do you think…did I take it too far?