Vacation Strategy

I have a vacation coming up, and that has got me to thinking about how my vacations vary from the stereotypical vacation.

In a stereotypical vacation you lie on the beach all day at a swank resort, sipping various concoctions which all have umbrellas in them. Other than that, you may do a little bit of sightseeing, but mostly it’s all about the lying on the beach.

My vacation is going to be with my friend Lurch, and our vacations, in contrast, are defined by the following key criteria.

• Very little advance planning is done. We basically know the state or states we’re going to be visiting, and that is all. A few points of interest may be picked out ahead of time, but that is only if one of us was extremely bored, and there is no guarantee that they will actually be visited.

• We don’t have any plans as to where we’re going to stay each night. Typically, we randomly find a camp site sometime during the day. (However, if we’ve camped for about a week straight, we sometimes get a hotel, because at that point we’re both emanating visible smell rays, like in the cartoons.)

• Each day we look at a map or read a guidebook to help us find some new place to explore. To us, exploring typically means hiking, and hiking typically means climbing hills or mountains so that we can see how everything looks from the top. There’s something about hiking for two hours uphill just so we can look around for two minutes before heading back down that appeals to us. For example, on our last vacation, on our first day in Vermont, the first thing we did was climb to the highest point in Vermont, where we stayed for about five minutes. We figured, why mess around with anything less than the highest point in Vermont? So, essentially we spend our vacations climbing up and down mountains, and by the end we can virtually speed walk up any mountain that’s put before us.

• After a hard day of exploring we return to our campsite and cook up dinner. This is always fun. This is because grocery shopping is one of the highlights of the trip, as we randomly push a cart through a foreign grocery store and pick things off the shelf that look good, even if it isn’t considered camp food. On my last vacation we made tacos, which turned out excellent. (The steak 'n' tater sandwiches, however, weren't as good as we had hoped. But still, it was worth a try!)

• After dinner we accomplish nothing but playing cards and maybe tossing around a football. I’ve brought books, but normally they don’t get read.

• During our drives to and from various places, it’s customary to stop at random basketball courts for a quick game of H-O-R-S-E. It’s a good way to break up a five hour drive, especially if we’re starting to get snippy with one another, as we have very little overlap in terms of musical tastes.

• Before we know it, the vacation is over. We’re tired, stinky, and our calves have become way bigger and stronger than they were when we started. I typically have taken about four thousand pictures, and Lurch has taken approximately three, all of which he will never look at again.

What a great system! I urge you to employ is someday, but if you do, remember one key rule: bring lots of deodorant.