Describe your most memorable vacation.
I’ve been on vacations as a kid, with that family growing up. I was kind of a tag along and did what my parents decided mostly. We went to the beach a lot growing up in Florida. That meant I grew up next to Disney World. Heck, we didn’t even have Disney until 8th grade for me. My memories there are of playing alone next to the ocean in my own world.
Then came vacations with a different family, my wife and kids. We traveled around the world. They were good times that I’ll remember while taking one kid fishing everywhere and the other doing anything to keep her from being bored. There was no time to recover or recharge my social battery.
Later in life I did stuff like sailfishing in Costa Rica or going to F1 in Italy and again they were good, but stressful trying to catch planes and waiting in huge crowds. I still had to rush to catch planes and was a mule hauling luggage around the world.
As always though, my introvert self comes out. Vacations where you are always on the run and trying to make everyone happy wore my social battery out to the point that I’d need a vacation to recover from vacation.
Now, I just go to the mountains where there aren’t many people and I can relax without having people acting like tourists or waiting in line. I have my stuff in my place and I can do gardening and tree trimming out in field with no one telling me what to do.
Not having the next deadline or trying to catch the next plane is my favorite.
Delusions of Adequacy 
Recently I had the wonderful opportunity to visit a world far, far away where customs from long, long ago were practiced by people very much like my forebearers who spoke a strange language which surprisingly I could understand.
Many pleasant hours I spent admiring the charming countryside, the old-fashioned fashions, the interplay of well-behaved and wonderfully trained domestic service workers with a family of titled aristocracy as a way of life succumbed to progress, technology, and social change.
Each day over a course of 2 hours or so, I watched sibling rivalry, noblesse oblige, pretension, intrigue, quaint manners, archaic customs, lost traditions, and social discipline in action from the fetch-and-carry common folk to the entitled elite in an environment which no longer exists.
Returned to reality about a month ago and eagerly await the chance to relive the experience as my octogenarian memory allows it all to dissipate and I can re-watch the entire Downton Abbey box set as if for the first time.
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