Dr. Forbush Thinks

 

Vacation comes from the word vacate. As in "to vacate" your home for a couple of weeks in the summer. Vacation is the word used in the United States to describe the act of taking a couple of weeks off and leave the house to go somewhere else. In England the general term is "Holiday." "Holiday" makes the typical American think of having a party or celebration, and most American vacations are actually more like vacating your house for a couple of weeks.

 

When I grew up in the 1960s vacations were more about leaving your home and going off to see the world. Somehow in the last 15 years the type of vacations my friends and acquaintances seem to talk about are more along the lines of vacating your house and living in a hotel for couple of weeks. People vacate their houses and live on big floating hotels that travel up and down the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. People vacate their homes and live in hotels in foreign countries. And, people vacate their homes and live in fancy hotels in fancy places like Aspen, Palm Springs, Las Vegas and Orlando. In all these cases it seems that people are looking for a chance to live in a different place away from were they normally live and to do so in an upscale pampered way.

 

Well, we've done the cruise thing and the Las Vegas thing and aside from our actual location the two vacations didn't seem to be much different. The idea was to go off to a fancy hotel, and live a lifestyle that you could never afford on your current salary. And, you can gamble some of those dollars that you have saved away for your trip in an effort to win enough money to make the lifestyle permanent. The people living the fantasy are not being capitalists; they are dreamers hoping to fulfill the desire to live in a fantasy world without putting in the effort to earn the fantasy. The real capitalists in this picture are the people who have invested in keeping the American peoples eyes covered by continuously telling them that perhaps they could "win" the lifestyle of their dreams by taking a chance. All the while these "capitalists" take the sucker's money and create their own fantasy lifestyle with this money.

 

 This year we opted for the 1960s style "visit America" type vacation. We loaded up the family car and set off to visit America. We decided that we would have minimal plans and we would let karma and the wind guide us on our trip. We actually did very little planning before our trip. We expected to visit two of our friends – one lives in Longmont, Colorado and the other lives in Tucson, Arizona. Other than those two plans we decided that we would merely stop at places along the way, learn about the place and experience America. Most of our trip entailed visiting National Parks and museums, but even meeting people along the way expanded our visit of America. We also visited the history of America in a more subtle way. I had recorded mp3s of old time radio programs first broadcast in the 1930s – 1950s and we listened to these programs while we drove the 6 to 10 hours of driving each day.

 

In future blog entries I hope to go into some of the details of our adventure. Our family ended up collecting the license plates of the cars we saw along the way. We "saw" 48 of the 50 US states on our trip. I'd like to invite you to guess which two states we didn't see. We found three on the last day, so if anyone wants to guess the last five that would be fine as well. I'll give the answer in the comments in a couple of weeks. Since we saw so many license plates I assume that we actually saw and talked to a good cross section of the country as well. We talked to people and we eavesdropped on people as well, and I'll write about some of that as well.

 

The main point is – I'm back and I'll be writing once again.