Relax, Rewind, Repeat

The Hobbits don’t always do vacations very well.

For one thing, T’s parents never really went on vacation-vacations. Usually, a cross-country drive was accompanied by a funeral, a family reunion in sickening Southern heat, or an anniversary party where strangers poked arthritic fingers into her sides and mused on how much she looked like Auntie So-and-So. Travel was inextricably linked with family, people T. loved dearly, but preferred to love from a great distance — preferably the width of the Continental U.S. When they were tiny, T. and her siblings invariably asked, after an extended trip to the Southeast to visit relatives, “Mommy? When are we going back to America?”

D’s experience with vacationing is more or less the same. At one point, his parents sent him for two weeks to summer camp. And went to Hawaii for those same two weeks while he was gone, taking his younger siblings with them. He’s still never been. Twice his parents sent him out of the country by himself, once when he was thirteen, and it wasn’t a vacation. It was educational, and until he was in college, all of his trips out of the country involved school. D. also had the inevitable trips to Grandma’s place, which were mostly long trips to the beach, playing in the surf. Good times. Almost Official vacations. But not quite.

T. and D. have had not much experience in vacationing, which makes for two Hobbits who don’t go anywhere much, and can’t usually figure out a reason to go. And come on — the original Hobbiton was in Northern California’s Wine Country, where people generally go for vacation. Mountains and beaches and skiing and sailing and San Francisco and more. Who needs to go away? But, they tried, sometimes wanting to experience Away, and other times just needing to put some distance between themselves and their usual haunts. They mastered day-tripping, and became fairly adept road warriors.

But, as vacationers… taking trips that required an overnight stay, well… Not to put too fine a point on it, but T. and D. FAIL at vacationing. Case in point: Palm Desert, a few years ago. D. and T. drove down to the flat, open desert, took in Palm Springs (and almost got a ticket driving the wrong way on a one-way road), and arrived at their quaint hotel, an old-timey sanatorium, complete with mineral baths. They swam and sauna’d and had a good breakfast the following morning. They took the tram up Mt. San Jacinto, and left the broiling valley floor for the snow-capped peaks. They walked around, clambered on rocks, and came down to Joshua Tree when T. showed signs of altitude sickness. They had a fabulous day.

A four o’clock the following morning, D. sat up and said, “I don’t like this hotel. Let’s go home.

It had happened before. T. just rolled her eyes, packed, and got back in the car. Palm Desert was behind them by 5:30.

The last Official Vacation? Was in 2000, and included stops in Holland, Germany, and France, squeezing in too many countries in too little time. It was overwhelming and frazzling and stressful, and T. wished desperately they’d simply chosen to stay in Holland, and vowed she’d never do anything like that again. There have been many fun weekends — family retreats in Yosemite and a few days in Monterrey with the sibs in tow — but where there are relatives (at least T’s relatives, as she freely admits), there are also complications, and when there are potentially bored, small children which aren’t your own and are potentially pesky when bored, every moment has to be choreographed and planned. Those vacations don’t quite count. Vacations are when one has time alone; when one’s mind can be blank for hours at a time, standing ankle-deep in the surf, watching the sea…

Not a lot of blankness here. For Hobbits, both D. and T. are pretty tightly wound.

Meanwhile: many birthdays. Graduations. Books published. Successes. Things which could have been celebrated which were briefly acknowledged, and passed over. Events simply crying out for a weekend away, or, indeed, a vacation. Which never seems to happen. Meanwhile, a friend of a relative is giving away a vacation house, being disinclined this year to take the week away himself. We eyed the opportunity with suspicion. No schedule? No routine? Once we catch up on sleep, what else will we do?

We do intend to find out

In honor of many of those celebrations past and passed, T. has been gifted with a camera — her first new one. (Welcome to the 21st century, T. Her old camera is a 35mm with manual film advancing that she found at the end of one summer at camp. Be afraid.) We now have moving pictures.

– D & T

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