I Ain't Right In The Head...

I do not recall the class in grade school, high school, college, or any post-school seminar educating people on how to Vacation.  I missed that.  I do not do well with "unstructured" vacation time.  

For a number of years, as a family we visited Iowa, spending time with my mother-in-law in Iowa.  Aside from the cheap housing, we did end up developing a fair routine when it came to things to do.  We would end up at Wal-Mart, enjoying the prices often half, or less, than those at home, take grandma out to eat, visit friends, a winery or two, other nearby attractions, then head home.  When it came to my folks, we'd spend an afternoon with them, head out to visit some friends, then head home.  

That was pretty much the extent of our "vacations" until the kids got a little older, then we started a 5 year tradition of camping on Memorial and Labor Day weekends.  The spring trip was usually rainy, at least in part, while the fall trips were often dry the whole weekend on.  But then things went sideways with my employment, and we did not have those holiday weekends free, usually working in retail.

So I suppose I haven't been trained all that well when it comes to vacation time.  I'm not looking for pity or help, I just don't do well with unstructured time that does not provide the opportunity to "get things done" for me.  I have plenty of things I need to get done at home, so spending time away from home to "relax" does not do me any real good.  Thanks to Brian Bilbrey for inventing the "NOBS" explanation for sleeping poorly when Not in Our Bed Syndrome.  As noted above, time spent at my mother-in-law's home occurred several times a year, where the bed was not our normal home king-sized bed, but a full bed.  Normal people might not have found this overly difficult, but i used to sprawl all over the bed - still do at home, but when visiting, I tried to maintain a fairly small space in the bed, with my back up against the textured wall that had the equivalent of 60-grit sand paper.  Yeah, fairly harsh.

Some years ago my wife found a resort in Northern Minnesota.  The idea left me cold.  I'm not a "resort" person, I don't care for that sort of life.  It's not a back-to-nature experience like camping is.  For me, it is very much a reminder of all of the things which I may have been able to enjoy had I not experienced the early temporary retirement I got from 2009 to 2012.  

Yes, I was laid off during the recent "Great Recession."  We all know that.  The issue for me, when it came to that, was the destruction of all of my retirement savings, the incurring of a fairly large amount of personal debt - the sort of debt one does not "declare bankruptcy" to avoid.  And the subsequent six years of relatively low wages while working in retail pretty much assured that I'm not going to be retired at any point in the future.  I am maxing out my current employer's 401k opportunity, and I'm making a fairly good living these days.  I'm not making six figures a year, which was one of my goals back when I started working as a young man.  But realistically, given that I flat-out changed careers in my later year pretty much assured that would never happen.

Do I wish I had remained in IT?  Not at all.  The field is one I very much enjoyed, but the bottom line at least for me was that, without the opportunity to move into an "executive management" position, the IT field is one where younger people tend to succeed.  I had accumulated a broad range of skills, from network and server management, desktop support, network security, software development, training and documentation, but the IT field especially values specialists, not generalists, and that's fine with me.  

But none of that explains why I'm so terrible at time off.  I suppose it stems at least a little from the work ethic my father had, and installed in me.  I was aware of school vacations starting about six or so, but vacation typically implies unstructured free time.  When my father took time off from his "day job" he was often spending time researching and or writing the next history book.  For a great many weekends until I was about ten or so, my father would leave home early on a Saturday morning carrying a briefcase and a massive reel-to-reel, briefcase-sized tape recorder.  He would go to the Minnesota Historical Society building in St. Paul, and spend most of his day reviewing and reading newspaper articles for research.  

He'd come home after a full day in St. Paul, about an hour and a half away, then type up his notes and write the books.  That happened in the evening after dinner, after he'd worked his day job.  Vacations, for Dad, were like that.  There was the "day trip" we took back in the early 1970s to see Lake Pepin.  All of us kids were hooked on reading the Little House On The Prairie books, and we all knew they started in Wisconsin.  We took a trip down to southern Minnesota, crossed over to Wisconsin, didn't find anything that was related to the Little House books, returned to Minnesota, and on the way back home, we stopped at a store in Red Wing, Minnesota.  For some reason unknown to me even today, when we were released into the store to pick "a souvenir" I came to the counter with a maraca.  A red maraca, to remember our trip to southern Minnesota to see the sites from the Little House books.  

I think I was eight or nine before I remember our next trip, which consisted of a shorter trip a bit north to drive all the way around Lake Mille Lacs.  For those of you who do not have the benefit of living in this state, Mille Lacs has the distinction of being a large lake mid-state that, from one shore, does not appear to have another.  Having circumnavigated it, I can assure you there's a shore all the way around.  What struck me most from that trip was the cooler full of sandwiches we brought with so as not to have to buy food, and the stop at the Native American reservation souvenir store.  I can't recall what I selected there, but what did make an everlasting impression upon me was the appearance of the place, and how run down everything looked.  It wasn't all that much later when, as an adult, my job was to set up a time and attendance system for the new casino that the tribe had built, growing out of their "bingo business" which really did wonders for improving their living standards.  A few years after that, I returned to the new museum, which had replaced the old one, with a group of Scouts who wished to work on their Indian Lore merit badges.  They were still doing very well.

The only other vacations my family took were the "big trips" we took.  In 1976, I figure, we again packed into the station wagon, with each of us bringing a few other necessary items.  We rode to Duluth and checked into a Holiday Inn that was just down the street from the Lift Bridge in Duluth.  AS a kid, we didn't eat out in restaurants.  I don't mean regularly, or rarely.  This trip to Duluth was one of the first, at the age of 12, that I recall eating in a restaurant.  Occasionally my father would drive into town on a weekend, pick up a bag of burgers or something along those lines, and bring them home.  But this trip, we ate in a restaurant, we slept (all 7 of us) in a hotel room (my mom and dad and my youngest sister in one king-sized bed, the other three girls in the other bed, and me on a "trundle bed" that was as uncomfortable as it sounds).  

The next morning we got up, loaded into the car, and went north to the Canadian border.  We crossed it, and a very few miles north there was a small souvenir shed, where we each got to select something, then we headed back home.  I know it was the summer of 1976 because one of the newspapers in the lobby of the Holiday Inn had front page stories about the initial Coast Guard report on the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  

It was probably the summer of 1977 when we took "The Big Trip".  Like going around Lake Mille Lacs, my parents decided to go around Lake Superior, as well.  Day one saw us from St. Cloud to Marquette, Michigan.  Day two was Marquette to Sault Ste. Marie, by way of Mackinaw City and the single most frightening bridge crossing I ever experienced, with the Mackinaw Bridge having a open steel-grid decking - which meant that if one looked down out of the car window, when traveling at 50+ miles per hour, one saw the water below - and no bridge deck.  Terrifying.  

Day three saw us go from Sault Ste. Marie into Canada, we toured a fort north of the border, then to a small town some 40 miles northeast of Thunder Bay.  We then made it from there to Thunder Bay, took a boat tour of the harbor, then made it all the way home.  And then discovered my father left his rather expensive camera gear in the hotel in that small town, but he contacted them, they shipped it to him.  

So yeah, for me, as a kid, vacations were not sit-and-relax time.  They were go-go-go-do-things time, and I never really learned how to unwind.  As an adult now, I spend a fair amount of my "vacation" time worrying about what's going on back at work that's going to need me to clean up, and all of that.  Plus I sleep poorly away from home, and that just compounds my discomfort.  So yeah, I have issues.  I'm not a very good traveler.