Pre-Vacation Planning: Goal, Plan, Action

We are taking a family trip to Vegas next weekend. There is an athletic competition and our daughter is competing. That's correct. Vegas...sober. Weird, right?! Gosh if this were early sobriety, this trip would be so difficult.

When we were drinking, it would have looked something like this: 

Goal: Family fun, bonding, site-seeing and adult beverages along the way. 

Plan: My need for control, would have required an itinerary of some kind beyond the competition. Our love of alcohol would have turned our focus to good places to have drinks at every meal (and likely in between) - not difficult in Vegas. 

Action: We would have been well prepared for and rocked the competition, and all other family activities would have involved a drink in the hand. As the trip wore on, the morning mimosas would become more of a necessity than festive fun. We would have returned home exhausted, run-down, overwhelmed with the preparations for a work/school week, and with anxiety for the week ahead. 

In early sobriety, the anticipation of this trip would have been riddled with emotion and anxious thoughts. Can we actually go to the airport, be on a plane, and go to Vegas all without drinking? That is quite the gauntlet! This will be too hard without alcohol. Vegas will suck without alcohol. I'm so jealous of all the people that get to drink at the airport, on the plane and in Vegas. The weekend would have been exhausting due to using up a lot of my energy on these thoughts, and resisting alcohol at every turn. 

Over fourteen-months sober, I have nothing but positive feelings and thoughts about this trip. Well, with the exception of knowing what my kids will be exposed to in Vegas, and what we will have to explain. We already know that we can do the airport and the plane sober - check! If we can do a Disney cruise and the Bahamas sober, we can do Vegas sober. That is how sobriety gets easier and better. Little/big wins that add up. Creating new associations with experiences. 

For our upcoming trip, solid (but not naive) in our sobriety, it looks something like this:

Goal: Family fun, bonding, site-seeing, adventure, and a break from the normal routine. 

Plan: Arrive late Thursday night, sleep in on Friday, get ready and kick-butt at the competition, see where the rest of the weekend takes us. 

Action: I'll let you know when we return! All I know for sure is that we will return with our sobriety in tact.