It’s that time of year when people start asking me the seven little words that make me quiver: “Are you going on vacation this year?” That simple question terrifies me. I know that vacations are the great American obsession, and I know people who plan and anticipate their vacations a year in advance. I am not one of them.
Admittedly, my vacation experiences are different from those of most people. Not for me the relaxing getaway that allows me to return rested and refreshed and looking 10 years younger. No, my vacations are high stress affairs where I work myself into a near frenzy wondering either a) what is going wrong in my absence or b) what has not yet gone wrong but will soon. I jump whenever my cell phone rings and fret when it is silent, wondering what bad news is being withheld from me.
Not to overstate the case, but horrible things happen on my vacations. I am not making this up; high on my lists of “bad vacations” are two sequential vacations in 1993 and 1994: In 1993 my 16 year old dog died while I was out of town; the next year my 17 year old cat died. Events like these are not calculated to result in fond travel memories.
Certainly losing a favorite pet is not easy, but family issues also develop when I am on vacation: My partner’s father died during one of our trips and my brother’s wife during another. Additionally, my mother has had two really bad falls, and my brother had his heart attack, while I was off “relaxing.” Is there anything to compare with that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you read a text message that says: “Bad news. Pls call home ASAP.”
If having a vacation cut short by horrible events is bad, the ones that are pre-empted by awful circumstance are no better: Hurricane Wilma was the reason I cancelled my second planned 2005 vacation. What happened to my first planned 2005 vacation? It cancelled because Hurricane Katrina also hit us that year.
Vacation memories for me are measured by time spent in the ER. Will I ever forget the trip when my partner broke several fingers in an encounter with a self-closing elevator door? How about the next year when he was stung by a bee, causing his face to blow up like a balloon? I am leaving out the many episodes of salmonella and ptomaine that have smote us over the years, always my fault, and usually when I try to be adventurous and say something like, “Is the tripe fresh?”
Certainly there are times when people don’t sicken or die or get injured on vacation, but in those years there are issues with the house. Did I mention the fire in the shed? The broken water main? The time when the house was burglarized while I was “getting away from it all”? Or my personal favorite: when on a clear, windless day a neighbor’s tree fell on my parked car in the driveway?
And finally there are travel disasters. The time the plane lost an engine over Texas was nothing compared to when I discovered, in the Mojave Desert, that my rental car had no spare tire. I also can’t forget the time when a wheel fell off my rental car as I drove over a bridge; As I got out to peer stupidly into the water, an SUV did not notice my blinking hazard lights and slammed into the rear end. That tale inevitably reminds me of the year I wrecked yet another rental car in Breckenridge during a terrible snowstorm. (The fact that I was in the hotel parking garage at the time is purely incidental.)
My litany of vacation disasters could fill many pages, but you get the drift. Vacation planning now involves a determined pragmatism on my part: My partner gets some travel brochures and checks flight schedules while I get some Imodium and check our insurance policies.