As I See It: The All-American Exhausting Vacation

Published: July 10, 2007

by Victor Rozek

If you can overlook the mosquitos and the natural grandeur, spending a day in Yosemite is a lot like spending a day at Disney's It's a Small World attraction. In both locations you will find crowds, long lines, and examples of people who wear exotic clothing and don't speak English. They come from all points of the compass, speaking a Babel of languages from melodic to staccato, and although their history and customs are as varied as wild flowers, they have at least one thing in common: They get more vacation time than the locals.

It's no secret that Americans get less vacation than their European--and in some cases Asian--counterparts. Far less in fact. It's not unusual for new entrants into the European workforce to enjoy four to six weeks of paid leave each year, while Americans get two which, because of increased economic and job pressures, they are often unable or unwilling to take.

The paucity of free time may be why we Americans try to pack so much living into our paltry two weeks off, especially if one of those weeks was previously committed to family obligations or house maintenance projects. Stuffing ten pounds of fun into a five-pound block of time is why so many people come back to work thoroughly exhausted from their vacation.

If you don't have kids, there are at least four types of vacations available to you, and for the sake of artless alliteration lets call them Party & Play, Challenge & Cope, Travel & Tire, and Rest & Rejuvenate. If you do have kids, "vacation" is just a euphemism for "mobile child care," so whichever vacation you pick it promises to be a working vacation. But you're not alone. Let no one doubt that we Americans, being a nation of 350 million action figures, tend to embrace the first three types and ignore the latter.

The Party & Play vacation is generally favored by the young. It's eat, drink, and chase Mary (or Marty depending on sex or sexual orientation). Boats and beaches, liquor and loud music, clubbing til dawn. These are the folks that go to Club Med where there's always something to do 24/7, and you can't afford to rest even for a moment because you'll regret missing out on something that would have been worth the price of the trip. Sunburn, hangover, and sexual dalliance are a must. Making a fool of yourself is optional.

Alas, this is not for everyone. A week-long party, coupled with sun and physical exertion, is precisely what causes strokes in middle-aged men, which is why they are asked to sign a medical release before attempting to play beach volleyball after consuming a huge buffet lunch and four pina colladas. Small wonder when the survivors return to work after a Party & Play vacation, all they want to do is rest.

The Challenge & Cope vacation is also for the young (albeit the athletic young, obsessed with beating nature and pushing the limits), and those middle-aged men who still pretend that the bloom, like the hair on their heads, is not vanishing. These are the people who read a story in Outside magazine about some guy who ran across the Sahara, and think "Hey, this could be fun!" The idea here is to do something guaranteed to push you to the limits of physical endurance and mental exhaustion. Anything strenuous enough to make a Spartan weep will do. If it's also life threatening, that's a bonus. Extreme skiing, rock climbing, peak bagging, riding bikes where mountain goats won't go, climbing Everest barefoot, backwards, and without oxygen, participating in the first nude expedition to the North Pole; it's vacation as conquest. When the adrenaline junkies get back to work they're usually just glad to be alive; but all too quickly they forget the suicidal aspects of their vacation, find themselves getting bored by the job they're doing, and start thinking about their next adventure.

The Travel & Tire vacation entails frenetic locomotion, compulsive sightseeing, and lots and lots of guidebooks. It's vacation as a to-do list. Eiffel Tower, check. Arc de Triomphe, check. Moulin Rouge, check. Notre Dame, check. Hey, that was great, now where shall we eat lunch? The Travel & Tire folks are like sharks that must keep moving or die. They move from activity to activity, museum to museum, attraction to attraction, able to squeeze an entire country and centuries of culture into a two-day visit. They're the ones who "do the Louvre" in under two hours, perfecting the tourist trot, running from the Winged Victory, to the Mona Lisa, to the Venus de Milo, snapping a few photos and scurrying off to the next attraction. When these warp-speed travelers return to work, it takes their brains a few days to catch up. But their bodies keep moving from habit, from desk to coffee machine, to bathroom, to breakroom. Their jet-lagged minds still full of flight numbers, train schedules, and exchange rates, longing for nothing more demanding than a dark, quiet room and stillness.

The Rest & Rejuvenate crowd actually dares to do nothing. They're usually older, wiser, and more exhausted than their frenetic coworkers. When they go off on vacation, they sever all electronic bonds to the outside world. They unplug from their PDAs and computers, and toss their cell phones down the nearest well. (Not really, since that would be polluting.) No e-mail, no text messaging, no radios, no cable. They don't surf the net; they refuse to read the paper. They want a break from conventional reality, which they abandon for a quiet place in nature, a good book, and plenty of time to rest, reflect, connect, and just be. When they come back to work they are renewed and ready to go, although they may feel cheated when they hear about the adventures and conquests of their fellow frenzied vacationers.

But any regrets vanish once they pause to remember the joys of modern travel. After you survive the lines, the silly shoe searches, and toss your shampoo into the nearest garbage bin, the real fun begins. As Garrison Keiller recalls: "To fly to Australia, you need powerful drugs that in our case we did not have, or you need to fly first-class for the price of a three-bedroom home, so you fly steerage like a criminal in leg irons and spend two weeks dreading the return."

Keiller, a wise and gentle man, says he finally got over his restlessness and yearning for experience after several disappointing vacations. No more "mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds," he says; no more exposing his pallid flesh to the tropical sun for ten minutes then spending the rest of his vacation "as a boy in a bubble, trying to keep anything from touching his skin, trying to levitate in his sleep." Vacation now has a different function. "Whatever my goals were last week," he says, "to make a difference in the world, to light a candle and follow a different drummer, perhaps teach a man to fish, my new goal is to get out of stuff. I am no longer available for work. So don't ask. I no speaky the English. Hard work pays off in the future, but laziness pays off now."

Rest is not a concept easily embraced by hard-driving Americans. We want to seize the day, be all we can be. We crave leisure time, then fill it with activity. We're exhausted before we go on vacation, and exhausted when we return. For some, work becomes the refuge. As journalist Kin Hubbard quipped almost 100 years ago: "Who remembers when we used to rest on Sunday instead of Monday."

It's not a modern phenomenon, just exacerbated by technology, which intrudes on the very possibility of prolonged rest and solitude. Among the many enabling qualities of technology is that it allows us to escape the discomfort and terror of aloneness by being perpetually plugged in. Blaise Pascal's famous observation was that "all the problems in the world are caused by man's inability to sit quietly in a room by himself." That doesn't sound like much of a vacation, but mastering the recuperative potential locked within stillness and quiet reflection can both increase our awareness of what we truly need and improve the quality of whatever kind of vacation we choose.

No less an overachiever than Benjamin Franklin--statesman, inventor, printer, scientist, best selling author, womanizer, and nation builder--determined that "He that can take rest is greater than he that can take cities." Franklin likely came to that conclusion because, like the nation of compulsive doers he helped spawn, the man just didn't know how to stop. He probably worked hard at resting, and when he failed to feel rested, concluded that it was more difficult to conquer himself that it was to conquer the world. That's not encouraging.

Oh well, maybe a nice prolonged siege of Barcelona wouldn't be such a bad vacation after all.

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