USA Weekend recently featured an entertaining look at multigenerational vacations – where retirees and Baby Boomers travel with their adult children and grand children. The article asserted that such adventures, “Create bonds that money can’t buy.”

The well-written piece primarily focused on picking up the whole gang and traveling on a cruise ship, experiencing a theme park, or going wild on a city safari. While those are all awesome recommendations, don’t forget that traveling close to home can produce similar bonds for a fraction of the time and price. Getting us away from our mobile phones, text messages, and computers often produces the kind of lift that children of all ages crave these days.

Mary, Katie and I discovered that conclusion this weekend when we journeyed about four blocks away to take Katie and Andrew’s Emmett and Amanda and Stephen’s Isabella–our grandchildren–for a picnic lunch and train ride at our community park. 

It was a great experience that left me with three major takeaways. 1) You can pack chicken nuggets, but sometimes a good thumb is all that’s needed.

2) Standing in line isn’t fun for long.

3) Human touch with those we love is always a great source of photoremedy – whether we actually snap a photograph or commit it to the part of our brains where we never forget.

Note: The photoremedy mission is to encourage those fighting chronic pain and other afflictions to consider using photography as a powerful tool to move their focus away from the pain. In the process, we strive to enhance readers’ ability to see beauty and experience elevated joy in their lives. There are many gifts that can accompany health challenges; one of the greatest offerings is it frequently forces sufferers to set better priorities for their lives and assists them in seeing the world in new and more meaningful ways.