The reasons for my lack of interest in travelling places are pretty diverse, but the single biggest reason for a long time was that we couldn't afford to go on vacation somewhere. A couple of times we camped via car camping to save money, but the sweltering Midwestern heat did us no favors with the "great outdoors".
I suppose we could go on vacation now, but I'm at that stage of my career where going on vacation is actually more trouble than it's worth. I have to get ahead of the pile of crap that is in my to do list just so I can leave and not be pestered by somebody --and yes, that has happened several times before*-- and then when I come back there's three times the amount of work waiting for me to deal with than if I'd just stuck around.
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| You tell 'em, Ron. From Parks and Recreation, via Pinterest. |
There's also the issue of me working around off days from getting kids back and forth from college, and now all of my little extra doctors' visits, so I've just kind of looked at what vacation days I have and take a day or two off here and there.
I do look at those people who could simply take a week or two off on release of a game they've been waiting for --or an expansion-- and wonder how they could pull that off. I mean, there were so many people who were going to go balls to the wall** when TBC Classic and then Wrath Classic were released, and now Diablo 4 has generated the same interest:
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| And oh look, there's a Zelda thread about pretty much the same thing. From Reddit. |
Still, that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate a good vacation meme, so here's a few to tickle your funny bone...
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| The few times we have gone on vacation, this has been my wife, wanting us to make sure we get to the place on time. From Pinterest. |
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| But this... This is me. From Someecards. |
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| Alas, this is me as well. After over 20 years of working from home, I have issues not thinking about work. From quickmeme. |
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| And then it's all over. "It must have been love, but it's over nowwww...." From Memegenerator. |
*And this was done by people who should have known better. They thought that my being "on vacation" meant I just wasn't visible on the company's Microsoft Teams. When they asked me to get on the network to look up something on a server, they were genuinely shocked when I told them I was 3 hours away from my laptop and was going to take this discussion up with their boss when I got back.
**Yes, it's more than just the title of a song by Accept.
Camping is good. There are a surprising number of areas where there’s No Service, and you can truly get away from it all. Atheren
ReplyDeleteThat is true, although nowadays I have to rigorously plan for every eventuality, especially my current condition. I think backpacking is doable, but car camping is much easier to work with.
DeleteFor the whole of my life, by which I mean right back to when I was about five or six, about as early as I can remember, I've gone on holiday, as we call it over here, a bare minimum of once a year , mostly twice and not infrequently anything up to four or five times. Being on holiday is living; evertything else is merely existing by comparison.
ReplyDeleteThe pandemic put a stop to all that. Even now all those barriers have been lifted, although we talk about going away, we haven't done anything to make it happen. Getting a dog has put a cap on going overseas until and unless we get her set up with the necessary shots and pet passports but we could easily travel inside our own borders and we haven't even done that.
Partly, it's the hugely reduced pressure of work now we both only do a couple off days a week. We have so much time to do what we want we don't especially want to do anything. It's also that one of the positive effects of the pandemic was discovering a huge number of places within a few minutes drive - or even walk - of our house that we didn;t even know existed - and we've lived here thirty years. A great part of the appeal of vacationing for both of us has always been exploring (True explorer archetype...) and we've been able to satisfy that without having to travel far enough to need an overnight stay.
I think that era might be coming to an end, though. I'm just beginning to feel the itch again.
Right now, at this point in my life any available money is sucked up by (pick one): car repairs; house repairs; kids who need stuff. Currently it's the car repairs that are getting the lion's share of cash infusion, but hopefully that'll start to slow down soon.
DeleteIt's so different than what my position was when I was younger. Back in college, some friends of mine and I used to talk about taking a cargo ship over to Europe (because it was cheap) and then backpack our way across Western Europe. Of course, once we graduated that never materialized, as we all went our separate ways. My wife and now two of my kids have been overseas, while for me I don't think visiting Niagara Falls really counts as "visiting a foreign country", because the Canadian side of the Falls is basically what we here in the States call a "tourist trap". And I'm actually okay with that, because the hassle of getting a passport and then figuring out what to do and where to go without relying upon a travel agency --or a Rick Steves' guide-- doesn't exactly excite me. Plus, when I want to take some time off the last thing I want to do is travel and do things, because it inevitably turns into a battle between me just wanting to relax in my solitude and my wife having to rush around and experience stuff.