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After eight days on the west coast, I am back in my own home, here in Snowstorm region. We had a great week, putting over 1400 miles on the rental car, starting in the northwest and travelling south along the coast. Because I had my kids and husband with me, I didn't plan any blogger meet-ups (we didn’t even bring extras on this vacation because it was supposed to be concentrated family time), but every time I looked at the map, I would say to my kids, "Oh, a cool blogger lives here." It’s funny how many town names would seem familiar to me – and then I’d realize that I’d seen them on my sitemeter. I loved seeing the beautiful part of the country where some of my readers and favorite bloggers live.

At one point, I said to my kids, "You know, I could take a summer sometime and just plan a roadtrip around blogger meet-ups. I’ve got enough blogging friends scattered about to make that a really cool trip."

Boy in Black said, "You’re going to take a trip by yourself and stay with strangers you’ve met on the internet? Aren't you supposed to warn your kids about that kind of a thing?"

Oh, yeah.

But still, it's tempting.

This was a different kind of vacation for my family. We usually drive to someplace and camp for a week, spending all of our time in one place. Last week, we travelled every day, seeing a new landscape every couple of hours. My spouse had six free flights saved up from getting bumped so often, which is what made the trip possible, and it’s the only time the six of us have ever flown anywhere together. The downside was that flying killed a day on either end of the trip, especially since our layover both times was in Southern City that is the Same Age as Scarlett O'Hara, a city that apparently has thunderstorms any time someone from the northeast flies through, which meant that we spend a considerable amount of time sitting around in a not very exciting airport.

I hadn't planned to do any vacation blogging, but since my body stayed on east coast time the whole week, I found myself waking up early, with time to write a blog post before the rest of my family woke up. And it was surprisingly easy to find free wireless. If we wanted to look up directions to a state park on my laptop or someone in the family wanted to check their email, we'd just pull into a parking lot somewhere and I could almost always pick up a signal.

When we got home and I started reading blogs to see what had been going on when I was gone, I realized that I had driven right by the BlogHer conference. It's a good thing I didn't realize this until we were home, because I might have been tempted to desert my family to go meet some really cool bloggers. And that's hardly the right attitude for a family vacation.