Family vacations are wonderful.  Seeing exotic places, doing fun things, spending quality time together, while leaving all your cares behind.  It sounds so wonderful -- if only it were that easy.  

Finding the time off and the finances to get you to those wonderful places are not always a possibility.  Often household emergencies, decorating budgets or even family crises eat into our "vacation" savings, not to mention the idea of having to send your children to college one day.  It's enough to make your head spin!

But sometimes a little creativity is all you need to take you far away -- maybe even as far as Hawaii!

Last summer my kids kept talking about going Hawaii, but we had just finished re-landscaping our yard (including the building of a pool) and a major vacation just wasn't in the plans.  While I knew there no chance we would be taking this trip, I thought about why my kids were so intrigued by Hawaii, and came up with an idea.

With very little planning, we had our Hawaiian vacation right in our own backyard!  For one entire weekend we were away (at least in our minds).

On the first morning I greeted everyone with lei's and a glass of fresh juice. No one had to make their beds, my kids swam all day long and we lunched poolside.  My kids even placed their orders for smoothies which were delivered on a tray (by me, of course) with little umbrellas and all!

In the evening we all changed into "Hawaiian" shirts and went out to dinner at a restaurant with an Asian/Hawaiian flair.  When we returned home, we all fell into bed, exhausted from our busy first day of vacationing.

The next day we added a movie to our itinerary, some more pool time and of course eating out again.  Upon running into some family friends that evening, my kids were so eager to let them know that we were currently "really" in Hawaii.

What sounded like a silly idea at first, turned out to be one of the most fun family weekends we could remember!  Just put a little thought into it and you can take your family anywhere!  This summer, we're talking about Italy (we do like pizza alot...).

©2007 photo/istockphoto.com