Vacation
I was on vacation all last week and did not have access to the Internet. You know what? I didn’t really miss it either. We went on our annual beach vacation with friends of ours. Four adults, three teens, and three older children, all of whom spend a large part of their time connected to the world wide web. At first when we found out that we no longer had Internet access at the beach house we were renting, the same house we’d rented the year before, I thought there would be a mutiny. By the end of the week, I expected our little society to fall apart, like in Lord of the Flies. However, after the first couple of days, I didn’t even hear the kids complaining about the lack of connectivity. Matt did sneak off to the local McDonald’s, which offered WIFI access, so that he could put out a report for work, a task he said would only take ten minutes. When he didn’t return after two hours, I began to worry. Turns out he had to pay $3 for access, so he spent sometime checking out his favorite website–the official website of the Chicago Bears. When I asked if he had checked our home email, he said he didn’t think of that. Where are his priorities!!!
We return to the same spot and often the same beach house every year for vacation. When some people hear that we’ve gone to the same place for 8 years in a row, they often tell us we’re in a rut and need to break out and try something new. I disagree. Our lives are so busy that we need a week free from hustle and bustle to decompress. We did Disney a few years ago, and while we had loads of fun, we were completely exhausted by the end of the first day. We were staying at a Disney hotel, so we took advantage of the extended access that Disney guests get to the parks. One day we went from 9am to 2am the next day! At the beach, we wake up around 7:30, which is sleeping in, enjoy our coffee, have a nice leisurely breakfast, head to the beach around 10. Some days we stay on the beach all day, but some days we come home for lunch and rest a while. Most people don’t cook much at the beach. We love to enjoy the extra time we have and cook nice meals. However, we also go out for wonderful seafood as well. In the evenings we drink wine and talk or read. We all read a lot while we’re at the beach. By the end of the week, we are so relaxed that we keep trying to think up schemes so that we can stay another day, another week, our whole lives.
August 4, 2008 5:54 pm 
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