Staying home is not really my strong suit.  I love to go places.  I travel with kids as my readers well know.  Once every year or two, my husband and I find someone to watch the kids and sneak away for a few days.  But a girlfriends’ getaway?  Not part of my travel repertoire.

I have friends.  Really, I do.  We always have good intentions of going shopping or out to eat, and sometimes we  toss around the wild idea of a night away.  I’ve even gone so far as to actually use a travel-planning site like Uptake to lay out a trip, but it never seems to get off the ground.  It’s kind of hard to coordinate the schedules of four moms and four dads and fourteen kids.

So we get together once a year for a very special event, one that’s set in stone on the calendar:  city-wide garage sales.  If you’re from a small town, you understand this concept.  If you’re from a big city, it’s akin to neighborhood sales, but the whole town is involved, and people drive from miles around to shop the sales.  Any garage sale shopper worth her salt around here knows the calendar by heart and plans her vacations for those rare weekends when there are no city-wide sales within a 50-mile radius.

But I digress.

Our sale is this weekend, so we’ve been setting up since Tuesday.  You’d think it wouldn’t take that long, and it probably wouldn’t have to, but like I said, this is our one time of year to spend time together.  We make it last as long as possible.  And since we all have kids, we tend to be interrupted for potty breaks and snack breaks and fight break-ups.  We eat, drink, and be merry as we rearrange and sell and bag our belongings and send them on to new homes.

Don’t you wish you had it so good?

Meanwhile, what we dream about is a real getaway, one without husbands and kids.  Yes, we love our families, but sometimes the moms need just a teeny bit of away time.

Maybe this will be our lucky year.

If not, when’s the next garage sale?

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