Back to the Basics

When my husband and I were deciding where we should go for our family vacation, we had several ideas:  A warm country, like Spain, where we could get our vitamin D fix, or trip to the States or Southern Norway to visit family and friends.  However, when we assessed what our family really needed we chose a simpler trip.

We decided to rent a rustic cabin for two weeks – no electricity, no internet, no running water.  We decided to go back to the basics.

quiet by the sea, norway vacation

We stayed in that little white house, which was built after World War II.  We had a tiny kitchen, a small living room/bedroom with bunk beds, and an outhouse.  The other buildings and cabins in the vicinity were vacant, so we had this lovely spot all to ourselves.

What would you do on a vacation without internet, video games, cell phones and television for two weeks?  Here’s some of what we did.

Explored the coast, looking for treasures:

Cast rocks and sticks in the stream and skipped stones in the fjord.

Climbed trees:

Crawled in caves and tunnels in the hillside and made shadow drawings on the rocks:

Found ancient Sami writings (over 6,000 years old)

Made play cabins from scrap wood (with signs that said “No Adults Allowed!”:

Ate some of our meals outside:

Including fish that that the kids caught – 9 trout in all!

We enjoyed the tranquility:

and autumn skies:

But most importantly, we enjoyed time together.  Instead of watching television, we read chapter books by the light of oil lamps.  We told stories, we talked, we laughed, we sang songs.  As adults we forgot the “to-do” lists, we sunk our shoulders and went to bed early.  Of course the kids still had their sibling rival battles – that’s included in any of our travel packages.  But at the end of our vacation we were rested, we were happy, were were together.

And guess what, there was not even one single complaint about going to the bathroom in the outhouse!