Good Deed #21 – Give Back on Vacation

Good Deed - Give Back on Vacation and Clean up the beach | OnePartSunshine.com

I asked my son what our next good deed should be. His reply was, “Since monsters are more important than people, we should donate money to monsters so they can buy people to eat.” You can’t argue with that logic. Instead of donating money to monsters, we decided to give back on our recent mini vacation.

My husband’s work schedule doesn’t allow us to take an extended vacation, so we have decided to do weekend-long mini-vacations instead. This past weekend we took a trip to Virginia Beach.

We spent most of the time at the Virginia Beach aquarium, where we pet stingrays, gazed at sharks and laughed at otters.

Family Mini Vacation to the Aquarium | OnePartSunshine.com

We also stopped at Colonial Williamsburg and walked around the historic area.

Family Mini Vacation to Colonial Williamsburg | OnePartSunshine.com

Of course, we couldn’t miss the beach. We strolled along the boardwalk and played in the sand. But I found that I just could not enjoy it. All I could see was all of the trash! The sand was littered with bottles, pizza boxes, broken sand toys, cigarette butts and more.

I cannot understand what people are thinking when they drop their trash on the beach. They come there to enjoy the golden sand and blue water and then ruin it. Do they think that plastic water bottle is just going to disintegrate? Or maybe they think a trash fairy comes along and collects it all.

What it boils down to is that people who litter don’t care. They don’t care that it affects how much everyone else enjoys the beach. Or that some hard-working person is going to have to come along and clean it all up. It makes me sad and furious at the same time.

So, instead of spending all of our time playing at the beach, we took some time to clean it up. My son didn’t mind because every piece of trash is a treasure to him. And I felt good knowing that we might have made a small impact on someone else’s vacation.

How will you give back on your next vacation?

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