My phobia of holidays has been fed, nourished and watered this weekend, leading me to speculate on why on Earth we seem to go to such great lengths to take them in the first place.
It is impossible to escape the one thing that many people are trying to escape from. Reality follows us around like a faithful dog, and like a dog it always has the capacity to bite your arse just when you least expect it to.
When you take a holiday, you are taking a huge risk; stepping outside of one's comfort zone inevitably leads to problems, whether it be in the quality of accommodation that you will find, or the nature of the others that you find also trying to escape.
I am trying to find the positives here, but having spent several hundred pounds on a weekend away, I am struggling to come up with anything other than a change of scenery, that were worth spending that much cash on. I didn't sleep well, the food was ordinary, the weather indifferent, and the journey intolerable. Sitting in a traffic jam for two hours and then having to extend a three hour journey into a seven hour marathon is not my idea of fun.
Going abroad is worse. I loathe airports and the cramped metal tubes that carry millions of sheep to exotic destinations where they can burn themselves to crisps, drink themselves sick and return with more diseases than they set out with. Unless you are lucky enough to have shed loads of money, any holiday you take is constrained, and it is impossible to escape from ones fellows however hard one tries. You can of course find places where no-one else goes, but there are usually reasons why they don't go there and so you might just as well stay at home.
Inevitably then, holidays are spent milling about with people that you don't really want to have much to do with, spending money on overpriced food, seeing tired sights, waiting in queues, moaning and complaining at how bad everything is, and then coming back to pay the debts that your time away have incurred.
I know people who regularly fly off to find the sun. They lie on a beach somewhere for a week, come back red or brown and probably have aged their skin by ten years in the process. I just don't get it.
2 comments:
After working many hours a week all year, sometimes just lying around and reading a book in a warm place is a welcome respite indeed...with sunscreen, of course. And meeting new people can be very enjoyable, if you are person who likes people. To each his own, I guess.
A holiday anywhere is exactly what you make it.
I guess some people will never be satisfied.
I just wish I had the time and money to take a holiday!
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