Even Lousy Vacations Beat Going to Work

When to take my vacation.

I know it’s August.

I know summer is a wastin’.

I know the beach loses something in November.

Still, I can’t commit.

Every time I am about to squeeze the trigger on a couple of weeks, I am slapped upside the frontal lobes by the same bleak reality:

Once I take my vacation, it will be over.

Then what?

Just the deepest recesses of the darkest hole of despair--and those will be the good days.

No, vacation time is too valuable to be used.

But why?

The answer would be simple if the dread of having no vacation time had anything to do with the vacation itself. But it doesn’t.

And the reason it doesn’t is that all summer vacations always go the same way:

You pack the car, leave at dawn, drive for hours, all the while praying the place you are grossly overpaying for remotely resembles the description in the ad, which it never does.

“Charming, cozy, quaint cottage (old, small, no indoor plumbing), sleeps six (on chairs in the living room), conveniently located (next to all-night truck stop / strip bar), short walk (for a camel) to private beach (private because of frequent fish kills).”

You arrive at your destination in time to miss the sunset. You are eight hours late because the directions made absolutely no sense and the roads were clogged with thousands of other drivers following similar hand-drawn maps.

As late arriving as you are, however, you are still in time to have to wait for the previous renters to finish lashing the last bike to the top of their sport utility vehicle.

This is not only annoying, but most unsettling, because it means throughout your stay you will be seeing mental pictures of these people, especially when you use the silverware.

The vacation itself is a blur of sun and sand and sights and shopping and slapping down the old credit card, until one evening you find yourself lashing the last bike to the top of the sport utility vehicle while an annoyed-looking family waits in an idling sport utility vehicle across the street.

And then it is Monday morning, your first day back to work.

You come in flashing your second-degree skin and brave face.

“How was the vacation?” you are asked.

“Great, fabulous, wonderful,” you respond.

Never mind that it rained every other day, the cabin smelled like essence of cat lady and everyone contracted some kind of intestinal thing (which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspect came from the silverware).

I don’t know. . . .

Maybe it comes down to reality versus hope springs eternal.

Maybe it comes down to a bad two-week vacation is still better than a good two weeks at work.

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Jim Shea is a columnist at the Hartford Courant. To reach him write to Jim Shea, Hartford Courant, 285 Broad St., Hartford, CT 06115.