I've been longing to travel quite a bit lately. I've always loved traveling. Some of my fondest memories are the annual summer vacations my family would take when I was younger. We rarely went anywhere too far from Iowa, so our destinations were typically Midwestern cities like St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, or spots like the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota, the Lake of the Ozarks region in Missouri, or the northern Minnesota shoreline of Lake Superior. We would always drive, and I would read in the back seat and inevitably begin to feel carsick. I remember staying in roadside motels, falling asleep to the dulcet tones of my parents' tandem snoring, trying to stay out of the radius of my brother's thrashing limbs (until we were old enough and my parents got a roll-away bed for Scott, hallelujah). In the cities, we'd go to a major league baseball game if possible, visit an amusement park, walk through the downtown. Some of the memorable highlights were originally experienced as lowlights (passion play, anyone?) but always, always the vacation seemed magical, a time out of time and routine.

My more adventurous travels began when I was in college--mission trips to Honduras and the Philippines, a semester overseas in Oxford, a brief tour of Northwestern Europe following. Lots of road trips (particularly back and forth between Grand Rapids, Chicago, and Iowa). Our big prize trip to the West Coast (I won a photo contest; the prize was a flying/driving trip complete with airfare, car rental, hotel and spending cash). Jeff and I managed to get back to Ireland and visit NYC before I started grad school, despite not having much money saved up or a lot of vacation time. I now wish we had done more.

Having young kids makes travel inconvenient, to say the least. Charlotte was always such an atrocious sleeper that any kind of disruption to her "routine" would throw off any progress we had made. So I was reluctant to do much traveling when she was a baby, plus, of course, the limitations imposed by a graduate student budget dictated that our trips were few and far between, and typically just to visit family. We did make it to western Massachusetts and Athens, Georgia in our last six months in Ohio, to visit universities.

Now, with Sam, we're even more hesitant to hit the road. He's not as apt to sleep peacefully in his car seat as Charlotte was, so any road trip longer than a few hours can quickly devolve into a horrible nightmare of squalling baby, whining toddler, white-knuckled driver and stressed-out spouse. Not the relaxing vacation I'm dreaming of, that's for sure.

So I spend a lot of time making lists--lists of places I want to visit with the kids when they're older and we have more disposable income. Places to go just with Jeff after depositing the kids at the grandparents house (right guys?). Places to hit up with my friends. Places to go with the whole extended family.

Where would you go right now if money and time were no object? Why? And what's your favorite vacation memory, and why? Leave the details in the comments.

For me, if I could go anywhere at all, I think I'd go to South America (Buenos Aires, perhaps), Spain, or New Zealand, for at least two weeks. I've never been to any of those places, and they are each suitably "exotic" enough to feel like a real leave-taking.

It's hard to narrow down my very favorite vacation memory, but I think my week-long trip with Jeff to Ireland in 2003, hot on the tail of my unexpected firing from my first job, was pretty amazing. And our road trip from Seattle to San Francisco was really memorable--we stayed at some fantastic places that we would never have been able to afford if it weren't for the contest.