Vacation Life

     Why do I dread vacations?

     My earliest vacation memory is sticking to the red vinyl backseat of our white VW Squareback while zipping along on a hot August afternoon on Interstate 5 somewhere in California's vast Central Valley, the windshield splattered with dead bugs, my face blasted with hot air from our open window air conditioning system, my siblings and I trying to avoid each other, though squeezed together, leading to inevitable outbreaks of hositilies, causing my mother to turn around and yell and my father to threaten to turn this car around and head right home, which was, of course, my fondest wish, for vacations represented forced confinement in uncomfortably close quarters with my family, nowhere to hide.

     Our vacations were grudging, too, my parents never quite accepting the inescapable fact that vacations cost money.  Not just the money we spent, but also the commissions my father didn't earn while we were spending money on vacation.  So we economized rigorously, driving not flying, tents not rooms, motels not hotels, boonies not cities, deserts not oceans, groceries not restaurants, all the while warily watching each cent.  I vividly recall our efforts to evade bellmen, dragging our unwheeled suitcases through lobbies, insisting we could manage fine ourselves while getting lost and backtracking and insisting again that we could handle it ourselves.  Or our attempts to avoid valet parking, particularly while staying at places that offered no other alternative, driving back and forth, strangers in a strange land, our quest for a free parking space subsuming our vacation and making it that much harder to drag the suitcases to the room. 

     And, perhaps for this reason, we never really went anywhere on vacation.  We stayed within driving distance of our Los Angeles home, never leaving the country, rarely leaving the state, barely venturing beyond central California to the north or San Diego to the south.  Reading of medieval peasants, living their entire lives within ten miles of their village, I could only nod my head in sympathy, having been there myself.

     Nor did we do anything on vacation:  no skiing, no surfing, no boating, no snorkeling, no rafting, no golfing.  None of the activities that entice normal active people from their homes.  Well, we did swim, when staying near a body of water, and we did hike, when staying near nature or when we couldn't find a free and close parking space, but we never traveled with the intent of doing those activities.  And we didn't relax either, no sitting around our lounging or anything like that.  No, near as I can tell, our sole purpose in vacationing was seeing things, soaking up sights, serving as passive receptors for attractions identified as being particularly appropriate for tourists.  Somewhere in my mother's garage thousands of borderless 4x6 prints slowly fade and curl, each depicting one of these sights, most with me and my siblings standing uneasily in the foreground, proof that we came and we saw and we photographed.  And then we piled into the red vinyl back seat and drove to the next. 

     And perhaps all this is why the word "vacation" is inextricably linked to "pointless deprivation" in my mind, for having grown up with vacations that accomplished little except making me yearn to return to everyday life, I grew to appreciate everyday life perhaps a little too much.  So much so that I hated to leave it then, and I still hate to leave it today. 

     But along the way I married someone with a completely different perspective on vacations, who actually enjoys them so much that she plans them and takes them and won't let me stay home.  And I have to admit these vacations are much better, for now I can afford do it right, to see the world, to lounge in luxury, to leave my car with the valet, to ask for a bellman, to eat three meals a day in a restaurant, to even have some fun. 

     Yet I still dread vacations.

     The problem is, they're now so good they haunt me, taunting me after I return, making a mockery of my dull everyday life, those momentary slices of vacation perfection casting such a long shadow over the rest of my dreary year.  It's unbearable.  I don't come home tanned, rested and ready, no, I'm grouchy, resentful and depressed, crushed by the burden of having to muddle through another fifty weeks before I can once again return, for one brief, shining moment, to that enticingly elusive furlough from life. 

     And, not for the first time, I have to concede that my parents were wiser, so much wiser, than they ever let on.

Comments

[DarkoV]

Tight bookends you're living between. Vivid, but miserable memories of vacations unfortunately taken. Delightfully buoyant, yet ultimately depressing current days off. What's in between is only work and an occassional child bouncing on your knee.
I have a proposition.
I'll gladly step in for you on your current vacation style AND I'll leave out memories of my childhood's baking-on-the-beach summers off.

[Oorgo]

Oh those are my childhood vacations, for sure. It was either mad driving stints in a cramped car, 3 in the back seet, Dad not even wanting to stop to pee, car acting up, sometimes overheating, or a day of boredom at a campsite, sitting around because my family didn't like to hike.

[MindSpin]

My father admired campers that were marvels of space efficiency; indeed they were vans extended a scant three feet. The central hallway of the family camper was not much more than a foot wide. My bed was created from the dining table; my brother's was a hammock suspended over the front seats. In the bathroom one could sit, stand, or rotate. We traveled over half the West corked in my father's camper, and more than once. And as we drove mile after mile, my brother and I seated at the dinette where we would eat and I would eventually sleep, I remember spending hours looking at the passing landscape, fairly projecting myself out the window into the space beyond, just for air. Occasionally, gloriously, it was decided that we would eat at a restaurant and sleep in a motel room.

I still dread long driving trips, and I'll always be inordinately grateful for hotel rooms.

[Julie]

This tore me up. Just wonderful.

My family never went on vacations. I do, but never had children to share them with/inflict them upon.
By the way, I'm with your parents on one thing -- too cheap for porters -- but do have wheels on my latest suitcase.

Hard to know where the advances and collapses are -- lots of lurching.

[R J Keefe]

When I was eight and nine, we spent a few weeks at a resort in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In the mid-Fifties absence of I-91, the drive from Westchester County took eleven hours. (It would be a six hour drive today, without speeding.) There were no highways after Hartford, only four lane roads that dropped to two between towns. It was excruciating.

But at the end of the second visit, I got to ride home, with my father, in my grandfather's new air-conditioned Cadillac. I had no sense of the passage of time; I just sat in the back comfortably and daydreamed my way home.

Traveling without comfort has never had much of an appeal for me. My idea of roughing it is staying at home.