August 25, 2008 5:37 PM

Towards a Riley's Farm Vacation

One of these days I'm going to figure it all out, but after taking the kids on several vacations, I can honestly say that with the exception of the company of my family and friends, I think most vacations are genuinely overrated.

Let me begin by saying what is good about a vacation, whether you spend it in Fiji or at a friend's time-share thirty minutes away from home: it gets you away, out of your normal routines, and there is something wholly good about the act of standing outside your life, and looking back at it for a week or two. Of course, not all vacations with children are exactly contemplative, but you can't help some rumination about your normal routines when you're away from them. I think the Sabbath is a small version of this brand of escape. We close on Sunday. If you held a pistol to my head, I wouldn't open on Sunday for the general public. I value that time, and I wish more people spent time squaring themselves with God, frankly, because it would make the world of business a lot more bearable.

I also think you find out something about your loved ones on a vacation you can't find out at home. Your physical space is concentrated and you have to pick common routines. We went to Hoover Dam one day last week, and there were times I had to call a halt to family democracy and anoint Jim Riley his royal majesty of the sight-seeing crawl. We also thought that Las Vegas might be recession-riddled enough to afford a walk down the strip, with kids, leisurely, on a Wednesday night. Wrong. I felt my Adrian Monk side welling up in me. I kept fighting the urge to yell out, "oh, the humanity, the humanity." In a mob, trying to watch the heads of six children, "1-2-3-4-5-6," "3 there, 3 there," "2 there, 4 there," was not exactly a calming, centering experience. "WHO HAS GABRIEL? Oh. There he is. Good."

"Look," I said, finally, yelling, into the sea of the world's people, "Jim Riley Family! We are going in there to have dinner. NOW." Sometimes there's a kind of pleasant council of equals that determines the day's vacation plans, but usually you need a strong father figure to say, "that's it. We're watching TV today."

(P.S. I do something to Vegas, just as a matter of principle: I play BlackJack long enough to win a hundred dollars or so, and then I buy the family dinner with it. If you ask the dealer basic beginner questions about the game, and double your bet after each loss, I find I can win a meal for 8 in ten or fifteen minutes. Why does it feel good to know that I beat the Bellagio? I don't know--except to say that it's something like kicking the Devil in the teeth.)

We lost a tire on the way out of Henderson Nevada at noon, (related?) and we limped into a brand new, utterly vacant strip mall parking lot to watch our tire deflate. The Auto Club of Southern Nevada sent out a charming guy who could not find our vehicle, and would not listen to directions on his cell phone, and would not return our phone calls, and who had the phone courtesy of someone transitioning back into society from a maximum security facility, so Mary, and Nicholas and I braved 111 degree heat to change the spare, using a GMC change kit that might have worked for a golf-cart, or a wheel-chair, but not for a big, gas guzzling SUV like ours. I got back on the phone to the benevolent Auto Club of Southern Nevada and told them exactly what I thought of their road side service and another driver was sent out. I got to worrying that they might actually send out the same driver again, and I remembered, in a flash, that I had left a few messages on that tow truck driver's cell phone, indicating what branch of the animal kingdom I thought he might be descended from, along with various other observations about his cranium size, and contents, and then it occurred to me I was appealing to this idiot for help, and he might not be the "heah, can we just get along" type, so I grabbed the cross-wrench and said, "Nicholas, are you with me? Are you with your old man?"

"You're on your own," he said.

They sent out a nice little, pudgy Mormon kid to change the tire, so there was need for fisticuffs, or any Joe-Somebody scenes out there in the utterly abandoned parking lot with the 140 degree asphalt.

Like I say, vacations get you out of your normal routine.

More on vacations tomorrow.

 

More of the Farm Journal -- August 24, 2008