Lol, my 16 year old daughter just commented today that our vacations are not like anyone else's! Not a program... but we have made sort of an art out of weeks or long weekends in various cities/parts of the country where we ferret out the art museums, science museums, aquariums, arboretums, planetariums, battlefields and historical sites, etc. We have done stuff like visit Fermilab, then go to the other end of the experiment where they are sending neutrinos through the ground to the underground (in a mine shaft) physics lab where they collect them. We visit places like Goddard Space Center, and smaller art museums in cities like DC. My older D is a foodie, so she makes sure we eat well. D16 was just complaining that we can't see the Rodin museum when we are in Philadelphia in a few weeks because it is closed -- "then we will have to go back to Phili some other time!" I recently found myself daydreaming about a family trip to Europe so we can go to CERN -- but that might be a bit much.
We use TripAdvisor a lot to review activities in cities and get ideas for things to do. It does take some planning, but we are all happiest when feeding our intellects, and my kids love these vacations. Sometimes we go for a planned vacation for a week, and sometimes we tack it onto something else (camp pickup, etc.).
Concordia Language Villages are a great family idea, we don't live too far away. My kids went and loved it, although we have never done a family stay there. I did parent/child space camp with my oldest several years ago, and we loved that.
