The Vacations We'll Never Take

On Instagram everyone’s got a life that looks like a fantastic vacation.

Smiling kids on boats. Happy parents on beaches. Look! There’s grandpa on a ski lift and grandma’s zip lining over the gorge! And our next door neighbors, the ones who fight every night? They’re clinking glasses at the Rosewood in Montecito where a room is $2500 a night. Meanwhile, my therapist is visiting distant buddhas in the green lush jungles that even Indiana Jones doesn’t know about.

Concerts. Sunsets. Ancient and obscure ruins (the more obscure the better). Bars on top of castles and piano players on the streets of New York. Saunas under Icelandic volcanoes. Fireworks over Mumbai and the twinkling lights of Hong Kong architectural gems.

And on and on.

All backgrounds for happy, smiling people who have fortunes to spend and no cares in the world.

We’ve all seen them. We’ve all made them.

And honestly, who can keep up with anything but a quick like and lazy heart emoji.

Here’s the truth: A few years ago, we wrote down on the vacations we wanted to take with our kids.

We had 10 of them.

Everything from a Civil War tour of the East Coast to a drive in a Jeep around the Great Lakes visiting lighthouses that tried to warn mariners to stay away.

Trips we wanted to take with the kids before they grew too old to hang with us, but still young enough to make an impression they’d remember fondly in their old age when we are dead and gone.

But today — well, today, it was clear to me that while we’ve done a good number of them, we’re likely never going to get through them all.

For whatever reason, that didn’t make me sad.

In fact, I thought, THANK GOD we’ll go to our graves with something undone. Something unfinished. Something left to wish we’d been able to do more, but also make us aware of the beauty of what we did do.

Including sitting at the dinner table laughing at poop jokes and listening to a kid explain dating in high school in 2023 and hearing about the play a coach made just because “I got an arm, Dad.”

Times when the phone doesn’t work or it’s been put away and, even if I wanted, I couldn’t take a picture of it and make look cool and rich with some stupid filter.

Fuck it. Rant over.