Every Vacation Is Too Short: Sunday musings…10/30/2022
1 Gallimaufry. A confused jumble or medley of things. Not a new word for “musings…”, today pretty much how I see every airline or hotel booking.
2 Booking. Pretty sure I’ve done this before. While adding stuff to my Outlook calendar, you know, in case I don’t have my stapled 8×11 stapled pieces of paper with me, I noticed a tiny, completely distressing detail I’d missed while booking a flight: I’m on a PM flight when I needed to be on an AM flight.
See #1 above.
3 Re-Booking. At the moment I’m in an airport getting ready to head home after a vacation in the Low Country visiting Megan (see below). Seeing my distress after my discovery above Beth gently took my computer away from me so that she could try to re-book my flight. This is the point in “musings…” where I usually gasp in awe at the power of Beth, of remote computing for, well, everything.
About that.
Turns out you can’t go directly to the airline if you used, say, Expedia to change your booking. No worries, unless Expedia isn’t working. Gallimaufry, again.
4 Short. As in cut short. Having taken a month off to recover from my hip replacement we weren’t able to get out of Dodge on the Thursday flight last week as planned. You see, all of the airlines that once had a direct flight from our hometown airport to Savanah and Megan have up and left town. Seems the landing fees at CLE are outrageously expensive. So if we wish to have a direct flight, and given #’s 1-3 above trust me, we do, we now have to drive 1.5 hours to another airport. This limits our options if I have to work on a Thursday morning because I was out of the office for a month.
Fewer options equals less gallimaufry I suppose, but in this case it makes “Short Vacation Syndrome” even worse.
5 Vacati. Every vacation is too short. There should be a word for this. Simply cutting off a couple of letters at the end of the word “vacation” seems kinda lame, but you get the picture.
I think the phenomenon is particularly if you are visiting someone you love like our daughter and son-in-law. Or going to a place you really love like beach or the mountains. Or headed out on a dream trip like an upcoming vacation we have planned to knock off state number 49 on Beth’s lifetime list, Alaska. Or…oh come on, vacation is always too short.
We were all set to put this conjecture to the test in 2020 when I was celebrating my 60th birthday and we were honoring our 35th wedding Anniversary. Seriously, when I decided to say yes to literally everything I was totally out of control. There must have been 8 or 9 trips of varying lengths added to our regular schedule of vacations visiting family. Just nutso. Of course we never got a chance to test the theory since all but one of the trips was canned by COVID.
This past week was kinda hard, and yet it still seemed too short. At the moment I’m struggling with IT band issues from my hip surgery and walking more than 20 yards or so is really painful. Our routine when we visit the Low Country is to start each day with a walk on the beach, and maybe end up at a breakfast place before heading home. Sometimes we head back to the beach later in the day to sit and read, or to exercise the pups if they are along. Sadly, all of that was impossible for me this time.
And yet, even though I like my job (my boss is AWESOME!) and I have family (GRANDKIDS!) to come home to, there’s something about not waking up to an alarm, to not having any real agenda other than maybe what time and where you’ll be fueling your body during the day. You can do the same thing all day, every day–all we do is sit on the beach when we visit the Cape–and you feel like you need a couple more days to do whatever that is when it’s over. Massively crazy vacations just chockablock filled with activities and tight schedules? Same thing. We once had a trip to London with the kids when they were younger and would have gladly suffered more exhaustion for a couple more packed days.
We probably don’t need to visit more wineries when we are in wine country, but there’s something to be said for being on vacation while you dry out.
There’s no real point to any of this. Seriously, none at all. I’m just whining about the fact that I’m sitting in an airport, sore leg and all, feeling like I’m here too soon at the end of another vacation that was just too short.
I’ll see you at home next week…
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