August 27, 2008 8:50 AM
Back to the idea of a family vacation.
Vacation ads feature a staple image of someone relaxing by the pool, reading a book, sipping on an iced drink, sleeping in the sun, that sort of thing, but even if your life is as hectic as ours, most people really only have the capacity--at most--for a a few hours of pampered sloth. The second day of vacation brings on the cosmic reminder that life is short and that you really ought to do something with it.
| "..most people really only have the capacity--at most--for a few hours of pampered sloth.." |
For the sports-minded, the resolution is easy. You can golf or play tennis five days straight. You can spend a week elk hunting. You can fire-up the ski boat and jump the wake from one end of Lake Mead to the other. When we first started pondering Riley's Farm as a vacation destination, we even found a Costa Rica adventure vacation destination that allowed you to dive with great white sharks for $10,000 a week--per person. For those who want a physical challenge, there is no shortage of options. (The shark-dive vacation has become a kind of mantric reminder around here, "if someone will pay $10,000 a week to dive with sharks, they ought to pay $2,000 to time-travel.")
Our formal business plan for vacations uncovered this reality in the year 2006: most "adventure" vacations (dude ranches, family sports camps, guided history tours) cost around $1,500 per person per week, including meals and lodging, but not including travel expense. (Note to self: check the standard deviation on this number; averages can be very deceptive.) At any rate, our first attempts have been mixed. We keep hearing from people who want to vacation here, but most people are looking for a kind of pup-tent bargain--pitch a tent, bring along the moto-cross bike, or ATV, or their 40 foot RV--and just kind of goof off for five or six days. That would be a nightmare for us, and for the neighbors, and I've never been interested in having a public campground up here, largely because I can't stand that kind of vacation myself. Here's what I don't understand about public campgrounds: theoretically you are communing with nature, but in practice you may be communing with the Hell's Angels in the very next picnic spot. (A few years ago, some friends camped next to a band of uniformly rotund women in identical tie-dyed shirts who had "no men allowed" banners posted around their campground.) There is more privacy, and maybe even more nature, and fewer freak shows, in a suburban backyard patio than you are likely to find in some regional campgrounds.
To each his own, of course, but I just don't understand the draw of a public campground, unless maybe your RV window looks out on El Capitain or Morrow Bay, but I never seem to find those spots.
When I was sitting around the pool at the nearly abandoned Lake Las Vegas last week, I looked around at the other families on vacation. There was an exotic looking Lebanese or Italian family of ten or eleven, whose very number was endearing to me, as a father of six. There was an alpha-male dad with three alpha male sons, sort of dominating the pool-play with their deltoids. My favorite though, was an Irish looking matron of seventy or so, easily three hundred pounds, and heading towards the pool with a kind of glee I couldn't understand. She was considerably past the beach-babe stage, but she looked very excited about getting into that pool. I wondered to myself how can someone remain so blissfully un-self conscious, and "party girl" into her seventies, but then I realized she was beaming not at the pool, but at her grand kids. She jumped in and started splashing around like a young mom in her twenties.
I came to the conclusion that I wouldn't mind hosting families like this--hearing their stories, getting to know them, sharing dinner with them--and that whether it was a living history vacation or not, there is something very pleasing about the Catskills formula, where families check in on each other once a year and catch up in a setting that actually puts them all on their best behavior. With a few dramatic exceptions, (which are good fodder for farm journal entries), most people come here at their very best--optimistic about having a good time. In a roundabout way, I'm getting to what I think I would like in a family vacation--some vehicle for challenging families culturally to do more than just sit around the pool. I would like to hear all those folks learning how to sing, or act, or dance, or write short stories, or stitch a quilt, or milk a cow, or press a cheese, or learn how to craft a good bottle of hard cider together.
It seems to me that a vacation should have both a daily challenge and then a chance to recount the trials of that challenge over a glass of wine and a fine dinner. People should have the chance to perform a little, to see whether they can make a room full of people learn something from their impressions, or just laugh together at them. If people get to know each other at a resort, it's by accident, but if they have a common challenge they get to earn, in a small way, what soldiers and dorm-mates earn, by virtue of the shared trial.
This all, of course, is the blithering narrative of a hopeless nerd, who, in truth, feels frightfully ill at ease around the pool, or on the tennis court, but I'm coming to realize that Americans need a little push, to go beyond mere consumers of ESPN. We don't have enough to talk about, because we let others do all the living. Vacations should be about heightened, or at least, altered living.
More of the Farm Journal -- August 25, 2008
