"Life Is A Vacation"

It's summer time and that means it is time to think about vacationing again. Should my wife and I go to the beach, the mountains, to visit the kids, to visit the in-laws? What are we to do? My answer is nothing at all. I am the type of person whose idea of a vacation is doing the same old same old.

My youngest son and his wife just got back from a few days in Vegas. Then he went to a seminar at Hilton Head and took the wife and kids with him. Next they are going to Myrtle Beach for five days. Wow! Whose son is he? The answer is his mother's. She loves vacations. The longer the better. I am a three day man. A day to get there; a day to be there; and a day to get home. 

My wife says it takes at least two days before she unwinds so if we come home the next day she doesn't feel like she has had a vacation. Me, I start thinking about what I am missing back home and I start to tense up. I can just imagine how many e-mails are filling my mailbox, and how many interview possibilities I am foregoing. I miss getting my mail at the mailbox and making my daily run to the Seven Eleven to get my "USA Today" along with my diet coke and cheese crackers.

These sound like humdrum things I know, but I like that routine way of living and I don't need a vacation to get away from it. Doing the ordinary things in life is my form of a vacation and I don't have to rent a motel room and eat out to enjoy it.

My brother and I were talking this past week and he and I feel exactly the same way about this "vacation" thing. He said he had never been on a vacation when he didn't long to get back home, and this is from a man who has toured Europe many, many times. He said he always gets excited about the idea of going on a trip, but as soon as the journey is undertaken he begins to wish it was time to go home.

My wife and I took a trip to Greece several years ago. I actually won the trip on a quiz show so I couldn't exactly say I didn't want to go. So there we were sailing out of Athens for a cruise up and down the Mediterranean, with stops at the various Greek Isles. It was a ten-day cruise and I wondered how I was going to keep from going crazy.

Just like clockwork, after day three arrived and left I was thinking constant thoughts about going home. I wanted to watch American television. I wanted to be among my own friends and neighbors. I wanted to eat American food. The Islands were beautiful, as was the Mediterranean Sea, but once I had seen the sights I had seen the sights.

This year my wife will want to go on vacation again. I can see it in her eyes. I know I will capitulate and try to muster some enthusiasm. But all the while I am off on holiday my soul will be yearning for the routine and mundane life I left behind in Perry, Georgia.

 

 

 

 

 

©2006 Jackie K. Cooper

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