What I can keep from vacation (and what I can’t)

Our family spent last week in Florida, a throwback to the summer vacations of my youth. My parents bought a timeshare condo sometime in the late ’80s, I think, so week-long trips to Daytona Beach became a regular thing, often in summer, sometimes over spring break.

Until last week, it had been six years since I’d been there. Many more years since I’d been there with my parents and my brother. Reuniting in the place where we made so many family memories (more than a few of which I seem to have forgotten) was a gift and a treat, a memory in itself.

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I have a complicated relationship with vacation. I love the idea of seeing new places and getting away from the daily duties of life. But I hate packing. And travel causes me some anxiety. (Let me tell you about the congested roads from Virginia Beach to Hilton Head. Relaxing in the car was not an option on our way there.) And as much as I enjoy getting away, I really like coming home. I’m the kind of person who would rather unpack and put everything back where it belongs. Schedules and routine are my friends.

I don’t have a lot of trouble leaving vacation behind. Occasionally I’ll entertain the thought of staying in a new place forever. (This is also known as “searching Zillow for beachfront homes to confirm that I don’t have a million dollars to buy them.”) But vacation isn’t reality. I know myself too well. I would find something to hate about whatever “paradise” I chose as home. I just can’t picture an eternal vacation.

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As I’ve eased back into our regular life this week, I’ve thought about what I can keep from vacation, and not just the memories and souvenirs and pictures. (And sand. How is there still so much sand?)

Mornings, for example. In Florida, I tried to keep to my usual wake-up time between 6 and 6:30 a.m. I know. I was on vacation. I was supposed to sleep in. Too many days of sleeping in throws my whole day off, though, and it takes me a good hour to adjust after I crawl out of bed. I am not a morning person, but I know what works for my body and mind.

It’s not hard to get out of bed that early when you know the sun is just starting to peek over the horizon and you can watch the show from your balcony (or pull up a front row seat on the beach). I checked on the sunrise every morning as my coffee brewed or as I got ready to go for a run. (I had a mileage goal to complete for a fundraiser.)

On the days I didn’t head to the beach for a tortuous exercise session in 100 percent humidity, I sat on the balcony with a book and my laptop and watched the world wake up. One morning, I witnessed a family preparing to leave for Disney. Most mornings, it was the usual crowd, though: half-clothed (in swimsuits or pajamas) vacationers stumbling out of their rooms toward the beach to watch the sun rise. Occasionally, I’d have to say “good morning” to a neighbor on their balcony. Never did I feel like I had to be fully clothed to start the day. At home, I tend to wait till I’ve had coffee and breakfast and a change of clothes before I wander outside. (I mean, what if the neighbors or a car speeding by saw me in my jammies? Shocking!)

The day after we returned home, though, I took this little piece of vacation with me. I wandered outside in my sleeping clothes to the garden to see how our vegetable babies fared in our absence. And I wondered why I give myself “acceptable hours” to use my front porch, my favorite place in our little rental. Why don’t I ever take my coffee and breakfast outside to greet the day like I did in Florida?

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And speaking of this little rental …

We stayed in a condo in Florida. It’s a pretty simple setup. A bedroom. A bathroom. A long hallway. A small kitchen with the bare essentials. A small living space. A balcony. I rarely think of condos as spacious, but really, we had all we needed for the week: a place to sleep and a place to keep and prepare food; a shower, a toilet; a couple of options for relaxing at the beginning or the end of a day.

This condo in particular is designed for vacationers, and I often complain about the size of the kitchen. We like to cook a meal or two (or more) when we’re on vacation, but the kitchens aren’t stocked for home chefs. So, we make do with what we have, using our creativity to make up for what we lack in tools or pans.

There are condos in Florida and there are large homes in Florida and homes of in-between sizes. I often dream of having a large home, and I’m not exactly sure why. (I seriously just googled the address of a large home in our area to see if it was still for sale. It is. My dreams aren’t dead yet!) Even when I’m not dreaming of a large home, I’m wishing for more space. When we moved here five years ago, our kids sharing a room didn’t seem like a big deal, but now, their tiny bedroom is just not enough. Or so I believe. They spent all of vacation sharing a room without much complaint.

How much space do I really need? How much stuff do I really need? In Florida, my mindset was that the condo was a home base of sorts. It wasn’t for spending large amounts of time, although one afternoon, our party of seven gathered there for an hour or so after we got caught in the rain. Sure, we were using every available seat in the condo, but it’s one of my favorite memories from this vacation. We were on the go a lot, and honestly, all of Florida is like a communal back yard, so maybe it doesn’t work the same in a place where we actually have winter. But I’m looking at our space and our stuff differently.

What do I really need?

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I’m not terribly adventurous. You might know this about me or you might not. I have my moments of brave spontaneity but these times are rare and they always cost me something emotionally (and sometimes physically). At home, I tend to stick to what’s safe and predictable and usual. The adventure can wait for another day because it’ll always be here, I think.

On vacation, though, it’s sometimes now or never.

Here is a partial list of what I experienced on vacation that I could have missed if I’d have insisted on sticking to what made me comfortable:

• I went to two local farmers’ markets with my husband on day 1 because we wanted fresh local vegetables as part of our vacation diet. Yes, we also went to the grocery store, but a farmers’ market as a tourist felt weird to me. But we had a nice conversation with the couple selling vegetables at the first market and found a sweet deal on fresh corn at the other. (Not to mention the pineapple.)
  

  I snapped this as quickly as possible to prove we’d all been to the top then hightailed it back down with my son who said, “This is creepy.”

• I climbed 200 steps to the top of a lighthouse, held my breath as I made a quick lap at the top, and went back down. And while waiting for the rest of my family to find us, I found an exhibit of Cuban rafts that had washed up in the area over the years.
• I took a ferry across the river to a national park site and climbed a narrow ladder to the top of the fort.
• I walked across a drawbridge in St. Augustine and then waited on the bridge as it raised and lowered to let a boat through.
• I led my mom and daughter through the streets of St. Augustine to find an ice cream place while we waited for the men in our group to retrieve the car from the other side of the bridge. (It was maybe going to rain again.)
• I ran on the beach by myself, with my husband, and with our daughter.
• I tried boogie boarding with my kids. In the ocean. (Let’s talk about this huge achievement. The ocean awes and terrifies me.) I even let the fish nibble my toes a little as we stood watching the waves. (It is the weirdest feeling.)

And then there were the detours and side trips that added time to our vacation but also unforgettable memories.

On the way home, we needed to stop somewhere to eat our packed lunch. My husband suggested we drive into Savannah and eat at the park right in the heart of the city. It was a Saturday and I immediately thought of all the reasons not to: parking and people, chief among them. Staying on the Interstate, stopping at a crowded rest area made more sense to me, but sometimes the call of the natural world is so persistent, I cannot ignore it. We found parking on a side street right next to Forsyth Park (and parking, it turned out, was free).

We lugged our picnic lunch into the park, which was full of people but also trees draped with Spanish moss. We met a man who wanted to sing for us, and we saw an owl and two hawks in the trees. We got back in the car refreshed and traveled some back roads to return to the interstate.

Our destination on day one of the return trip was Hillsborough, North Carolina, where some friends of ours live. (This is a longish part of the story. Bear with me.) The first surprise there was the uniqueness of their home. It’s an old historical house that sometimes gets mistaken for being open to the public. This was where we would spend the night. (What was not a surprise was how welcomed we were. Our friends are hospitable hosts. When I’d originally started planning, I figured we’d end up in a hotel. Staying with friends is a thousand times better.)

When the kids started to get rowdy after dinner, our friends took us on a walking tour of their town. At one point, my friend commented on a house we were walking by and said it belonged to Allan Gurganus. “He’s an author,” she said, and I wondered if I should know that name. She mentioned that Hillsborough has a lot of writers living there. I asked what this man had written. She said his most famous book was “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” and I exclaimed because I’d heard of that but never read it. (Writer and reader friends, this is where you may feel free to disown me, although how can I possibly keep up with all the writers and books everywhere?!)

My spine tingled a little as we passed his house and I kept thinking about what she’d said about all the writers who lived in this beautiful little town. We finished our pleasant walk at the park where the kids chased fireflies and a frisbee (which eventually ended up in a tree), and we took the river path back to their house. Our kids fell asleep in all corners of the house and it was such a restful way to end a day of driving. The next morning, over coffee, the authors of Hillsborough thing was mentioned again, so I searched the Internet to see who else might be living nearby. Only one other name stood out to me, and I nearly dropped my coffee mug.

“Phil!” I exclaimed to my husband. “Annie Dillard lives here!” Granted, I have only read one of Dillard’s books but she is so well-respected among the writers I know that our house contains many of her books that I have every intention of reading. She is a poetic, spiritual, artistic voice, and I WALKED THE SAME STREETS SHE WALKS. (Sorry for the shouting.) This was the second surprise of our side trip, something I wasn’t even aware could possibly happen. Never mind that I wouldn’t know Annie Dillard if I bumped into her on the street, but just the thought of such a talent being nearby sent me into a fangirl frenzy I clearly have not quite recovered from.

We left our friends that morning a little bit unsure of where we would go next. We wanted to visit another national park on our way home, but we had trouble deciding which one. We finally decided to drive toward the Blue Ridge Parkway. It wasn’t exactly “on the way” but it wasn’t necessarily out of the way either. Our route took us on backroads through North Carolina and Virginia. The mountains loomed larger on the horizon. We stopped for lunch and then found our way to the first visitor center. We only planned to drive the Parkway for 20 miles or so, yet it added hours to our return trip.

But it added depth to my soul. (I can’t speak for the others in my family.) At the gift shop where we bought our souvenir puzzle (we have a collection from most of our adventures), my husband handed me a magnet with the well-known words from John Muir: “The mountains are calling and I must go.”

“I saw this and thought of you,” he said with a smile.

It is true. Something happens to me in the mountains. I feel more like me. Those added side minutes on the parkway made the rest of the drive bearable and worth it. The views left us in awe, and my husband got to try out a driving feature on our new-to-us car as we wound our way up and down and around the mountains.

It was nearly dark by the time we arrived back at our house, and we all pretty much collapsed into bed. We could have arrived hours earlier if we hadn’t gone to the mountains. We could have been home almost a day before if we hadn’t stopped to see our friends.

I regret neither of those decisions and I will continue to remind myself post-vacation that the fastest most direct way is not always the best way. I will try to keep my eyes open for surprises and take a risk now and then on something new and different.

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Vacation is good but it’s not forever. At least, it’s not for me. Maybe there are some who could turn an endless vacation into their real life, but I can’t do it. I have to get back to the ordinary stuff of life.

Vacation also isn’t perfect. I could write another entire blog post about all the things that didn’t go as planned during the week. There was something every single day that kept my expectations from soaring too high. But this, too, I can keep after vacation is over.

Life is good, but it’s not forever, so seize the now-or-never opportunities. And life isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t stop it from being enjoyable.

We don’t bring home a lot of souvenirs from vacation–pictures, puzzles, postcards, a small gift for each of the kids–but the lessons and the memories will last from now until the next time.

And, I hope, beyond.