Living so far away from our family, the time we get to spend together is limited by the cost of flying and the number of available vacation days we have. So it's even more important to take advantage of the time we do get to spend together.

To minimize cost, we typically visit for a full week, rather than making multiple shorter trips. But that usually uses 5 days of vacation time from work, so it's hard to make more than one visit per year.

There's also the consideration of what we'll actually do with our family. It's hard to find things to do that several people can participate in and enjoy that provide an opportunity to spend quality time together.

Eating together and playing games seem to be good activities. Trying to walk somewhere often doesn't work if we can't walk side-by-side and comfortably talk. Sitting and drinking tea and talking works well for a little while. Going to sporting events works okay, but it's hard for the people on the ends to be involved in a conversation. We have to come up with enough activities so that our visits don't become boring.

But, often it's hard to come up with a full day's worth of activities to spend with the same group of people. That's why in the past we'd split up days - we'd spend a couple hours with my parents, a couple hours with Lesley's parents, some time with my grandmother, some time with Lesley's sister, maybe all in one day. We'd go a full trip and stay at a different home every night. This helped to make the days more active so that we weren't just sitting around bored, but it also made the trips more hectic with all the travel and nightly relocation.

That's what prompted our idea to visit with my parents in Austin. Since we'd be on vacation in a different place, we'd have plenty to do over a solid few days, and much of what we did provided quality time with each other. And, once we got back, we had planned to visit Dallas with Lesley's parents and to break up our time with them by visiting my grandmother and Lesley's sister, so we thought that would work well.

Lesley being sick interrupted our plans somewhat, but overall it seems like this approach was less hectic and it feels like we got a more substantial amount of quality time with each set of parents.

So, we may try to do trips like this in the future. The main concern will be finding enough to do with one group of people over a solid period of a couple days. We won't always be able to visit another city with someone (though we'd be open to it) and finding two solid days of activities in Fort Worth with either of our parents might be difficult. Still, it might work out better than staggering our time with everyone so as to spread it out over the duration of our visit.

Maybe there's another way that we could be planning our visits that we're not thinking of. It's definitely a challenge to plan these trips, but each time we plan one we learn a few things to help us make the next trip more effective and more enjoyable.