How often does a person need a
vacation? Certainly vacations are a
first-world luxury, and even within the developed world, standards for
appropriate amounts of time off vary from the American two weeks to countries
like France and Finland where they have 10 national holidays and 30 mandatory
days of vacation. Even within the U.S.
there is wide variability about holidays granted by employers; my husband, the Bacon
Provider, earned his keep at Microsoft for almost 18 years, never once getting
to enjoy Martin Luther King Day because it’s business as usual at Microsoft on
Martin Luther King Day. By my
accounting, he worked 18 days that the federal government set aside to honor a
civil rights leader and encourage shopping after Christmas. This is almost four weeks of vacation.
For our spring vacation last year, we
planned a trip to Japan and Hawaii. The Bacon Provider has been to Japan on
business a number of times, and has been talking about taking me there for
years. We were also taking our two kids still in the house these days, boys
aged 17 and 13. I have been looking forward to going to Japan for a long time.
We bought tickets in advance to visit the Ghibli Museum on April 14th.
You have to buy these tickets in advance, but it is not possible to purchase
tickets from the U.S. online. Instead, you must make reservations over the
phone. It is a complex transaction, where the purchaser is required to give the
full name and birthdate of each ticket-holder.
This memorable phone conversation took up the better part of a morning,
to a local Japanese tourism office in Seattle.
Obviously, rolling blackouts and food
shortages and radioactive fallout from catastrophic failure at the nuclear
power plant in Fukushima Daiichi meant that we did not go to Japan for this
vacation. I have waited a long time to go to Japan, and I will have to wait
some more.
When I was a little kid and still
believed in the possibility that the world was a very magical place, I used to
imagine that nothing happened outside of what I could currently see and
experience. If people went out of view, they stopped existing. Sometimes this
was kind of a cool idea, because it meant that I did not need to worry about
missing interesting things. Other times, this was a very scary idea, especially
when my parents took me to stay at my grandparent’s house while they went out
of town. I do remember wondering if places that I had never been actually
existed, or if they would be conjured up just before I arrived.
One of the many side effects of being
a parent is sometimes phrases get stuck in your head from books and movies and books-on-tape
enjoyed by your children when they were young.
My oldest (now an adult) loved Thomas the Tank Engine, and I can hear in
my head, “A change is as good as a rest!” whenever I think about vacation
planning. I don’t think we travel to
rest up. I think we do it to get out of
our ruts.
People closest to me know that this
moving-to-New-York-thing has been a bit of a long, bad vacation. A number of things have not worked out how we
expected, and I find myself living in a spooky and lonely rural/suburban town
for which there are no freeway exit signs, as if living here means getting away
from it all, whether or not you want to get away from it all. I do not have all
of my clothes or books or sewing supplies.
In early July I took a road trip, across the U.S., which ended with
moving in to a furnished apartment. From there we moved to a furnished house.
In the summer there were days when I had so much trouble getting going that I
would sometimes get back in bed, fully clothed, at mid-day. The pets thought it
made perfect sense. It was more of a function of needing a place to sit in a
small apartment than a sign of suffering, but I did do it more than once. These days I have too much to do.
That I am ready for a vacation means
that this is where I live: amongst the long drives to everywhere, the deer, and
the spooky water which goes to the faucets in Manhattan. Right
now, I am planning a trip to Barcelona in a few weeks. Only my youngest son
will be able to come along, but the Bacon Provider has reason to go there for
work and it sounds pretty interesting to me. I have never been to Spain. Those magical people better get to work
building Barcelona before I get there.
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