Posted on December 18, 2006 12:17 PM by chadley
Well, the weather is getting colder and the Christmas lights are twinkling warmly on all the neighborhood houses as I come home from work each day. I saw snow fly a few weeks back but I don't think we've gotten any official snow yet this year, however there are a few days left before Santa comes to town. Every year when the days get cold and the nights get long, I start to get depressed and then I throw the DVD from our trip to Jamaica into the player or I watch the footage from our honeymoon cruise that we took oh so long ago.Vacations seem like an illusion. You go away for a week or so, eat, drink, and be merry, then you get to come back to reality. Depending on the type of vacation you may get treated like a king. My wife prefers a vacation where you come back with a suntan (at the least.) A vacation can be like living a fantasy. On our cruise we got treated to multi-course dinners every night, went to different exotic locations, and lounged by the pool on the days between stops. In the evenings there were shows and the casino was open.
When we went to Jamaica we stayed at an all inclusive resort (Sandals), we ate at fancy restaurants and watched entertaining shows every night of our stay. We went on a couple different day trips that were loads of fun, unless we ate something bad for breakfast (me in Negril), or we got a bad case of sea sickness on the catamaran (Angela)
When I was a kid, summer vacations meant going down to the riverside campground for the weekends. There was fishing, swimming, canoing, campfires, and sometimes if you weren't lucky, poison ivy. I've learned since then that a lot of people head for the shore in the summertime. We never did that, and I don't even think I knew anybody who did back then.
The thing that I find really humorous is my dislike for cold weather. I don't like it when I walk out of my house in the morning to go to work and I have a sheet of ice on the windshield of my truck. I find myself driving to work, saying stuff like, "Why do I live here?" I've lived in places that had little or no snow. Hawaii, Panama, Philippines, California, Texas,... I may not have wanted to live in all of those places, but it wasn't because of the weather, I can tell you that. I wonder sometimes why I chose to stay in Pennsylvania. I know that some people say they like the changing of the seasons. I can understand that. My point is, if I want to see the snow, I can go visit it. I don't have to live in it. As far as I can tell I have a couple possible solutions. The first one is I win the lottery so I can just go on cruises and stay at resorts for the rest of my life. This is probably not feasible because I don't play the lottery that much and from what I understand, my chances of winning are only a little better when I actually buy a ticket. There's a bunch of other reasons why I can't just up and move south, but the main reason is friends and family. I know that my mom especially enjoys living close enough that she can spend time with us. And believe it or not I actually have some friends (my wife probably has more) that might miss me if I went away. So, that means I am back to solution number one, the lottery. That way, I can afford to bring my friends and family with me, at least to visit.
I better go out and buy myself a powerball ticket. In the meantime, let me fire up the DVD player and make myself a Piña Colada...
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Tags: vacation