u/lagori

We're selling our house in the UK, and I think it's fairly likely we'll have to go into rented accommodation for the winter. In addition, my wife's father passed away, and we have £10,000 we weren't expecting. We have kids (11 and 8), and my wife wants to spend this on a trip, so everything points to doing that over Christmas this year.

We're brainstorming ideas, and we can take a month or so from mid Dec to mid Jan. Our kids will miss some school, that's OK, we'll handle the fallout.

Our first thought is Japan or Thailand, then Australia and potentially NZ, before coming back home. Rough split 10/10/10 days. I have family in Adelaide, and my best bud is in NZ, so I think either/both of those could be essentially free accommodation.

Japan and Thailand both feel like they would be culturally very different. Our children could take a lot from either - essentially boils down to one being a city trip with theme parks, museums, etc. (Japan) and the other being much more beach focused, natural landscapes and so on (Thailand), but I base this on little insight. The Aus / NZ elements are rather opportunistic - if we're getting to that side of the world, it would make sense to see at least one of these places, with the bonus of having connections in either.

We live very rurally in the UK, but the kids are both interested in travel, and we feel we are at a great age to do something out of the ordinary.

Flights are going to be expensive this year, especially. We can top up the value if needed. Does this bare-bones structure sound reasonable? We don't need to visit any of these places, and I'm very open to a completely different trip, but I want to get somewhere we just wouldn't be able to go otherwise.

Glad to hear any thoughts, positive or negative and answer any questions - appreciate your insight.

I bought CS1 shortly after release, played about 16 hours, then found out we were having a child and put it down. A decade has passed (we've got two kids now...), and I'm keen to come back to it. However, given the huge number of mods, DLCs and content packs available these days, I thought I'd check in here.

If you were starting from scratch today, would you stick with the vanilla game? If not, which DLCs or mods would you consider essential?

There's a sale on at the moment, with 30–50% off a lot of the DLC, so I'm happy to spend a bit on that front. I'm based in Europe, so things like the Suburbs, Rural, and European-themed Content Creator Packs are likely worthwhile for me.

My mod consideration is that I'm playing on macOS. I tried installing the Vanilla+ mod collection from the wiki, but couldn't get Patch Loader working. Accordingly, I think I'm best off avoiding anything that depends on it.

Any insight appreciated, cheers.