The Weekend Trip That Almost Didn’t Happen

By Jack Mercer · Adventure · June 5, 2026

On the trip you almost talked yourself out of, and why almost doesn’t count.

We had a weekend away booked for months. By the Thursday before, I’d built a solid case for cancelling. Work was heavy. The car needed something fixed. The kids had a thing on Saturday morning.

My wife looked at the list and said one sentence: “There’s always going to be a list.” She wasn’t wrong, and I knew it, which made it more annoying.

We went. Two hours in the car with a kid asking are we there yet roughly every eleven minutes, and somewhere around hour one I stopped checking my phone.

The place we stayed wasn’t anything special. A cabin with a temperamental shower and a view of a lake that looked better in the listing photos.

And it was still one of the better weekends we’d had in a year. Nobody was rushing anywhere. The kids built something out of sticks that took two hours and fell apart in ten seconds, and somehow that was the highlight.

I caught myself laughing at something genuinely small and dumb on the Sunday morning, the kind of laugh I hadn’t done in a while.

The work was still there Monday. The car still needed fixing. None of the reasons to stay home had gone anywhere.

But I’d have missed the whole weekend defending a version of myself that was too busy to leave the house. Glad my wife called that one before I did.

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Jack Mercer writes about real life for men who are too busy living it to talk about it. No advice. No solutions. Just one bloke being honest.