Each year, my dad's side of the family would meet in a beach town in Florida called Rosemary Beach where my grandparents would rent a beach house for a week and have one big family vacation. It was a way for us Yankees to keep in touch with our southern relatives, as we really don't get down to see them often. It is usually a week or two after school gets out and, in my mind, it always marks the start of summer vacation.
For both my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I participated in Business Professionals of America’s Network Design Team competition. In this competition, you and three other teammates are tasked with designing and presenting a new computer network infrastructure for a pseudo client. The design challenge can be anything ranging from a nation-wide corporation to a state's traffic monitoring network. Last year, my team and I got to travel out to Anaheim, California to compete in the National Leadership Conference after we won second place at the state competition. We spent a week giving numerous rounds of presentations while spending our free time at Disneyland. At the end of the week at the award ceremony, we won 3rd place out of over 30 teams competing.
Last year for our Alabamian-family vacation, we traveled to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic rather than Rosemary Beach. We stayed at the beautiful Dreams resort. I spent my entire week reading on a cabana under palm trees. It was a slightly different dynamic than Rosemary Beach. In Rosemary, all seventeen of us live under the same roof so that we get to spend quality time together. In Punta Cana, we were all in different rooms in different parts of the resort, so we would spend the day together on the beach, but we all went back to our separate rooms at the end of the day. I always look forward to these trips and the memories I form on them.
Three years ago, my immediate family and I went to St. Maarten for February vacation. It was a beautiful and hot week. We largely sat on the beach reading, punctuated by relaxing meals by the beach for breakfast lunch, and dinner.