Vacation, gotta get away...
People ask, "where do you go for vacation if you live on The Island?"
Well, so far, I haven't. We've been here just shy of a year, during which we've moved in, lived through two hurricanes, had a baby, taken a painfully short maternity leave, and waged asymmetrical warfare against the resident insect life. My husband left The Island for all of 48 hours for a funeral two months ago.
So now we're taking a trip. I won't call it a vacation. We're flying to New England, where we will go to the woods to live deliberately with my in-laws -- including my husband's Euro-grandparents, with whom I do not share a common language. They seem to like me well enough; but last time we visited them, I broke one of Oma's plates; and when they visited us in the Baltics, Oma broke her clavicle. If we get through a visit together on neutral territory with nothing fractured, I will consider it a big win.
Anyway, at the end of this week, Gigi plays flower girl at Uncle Mikey's wedding. Then we'll make a trek down the coast. I used to love road trips, before they involved minivans and a matching set of preschoolers. This is undiscovered country: here be dragons. Or freakish purple dinosaurs. If only one of us drives, the other one can drink, right?
We'll stop at various midAtlantic points, until we reach the next wedding, my cousin's.
I remember this cousin as a baby. I held him up to my grandmother's apartment door and taught him how the locks worked. The kid could probably wipe the walls with me at chess by age five. He's now approaching the quarter-century mark and will probably be lending Bill Gates money before he's forty. (At the very least, he could kick his @$$ at bridge.) I say this out of admiration, not jealousy. I can not begrudge him his good fortune in avoiding our common ancestry's disastrous math genes.
But I digress. I'm going to be doing that a lot over the next ten days.
And I probably won't have regular access to the internet. See that whole "live deliberately" bit above.
So by the time we get back to The Island, I will probably need a vacation desperately. And I'll be back to square one, where people say to me, "Oh sure, you need a vacation - Duh! You live on The Island!!!"
Oh fate, how you mock me.