Vacation Frustration

The definitive end of a vacation is like a dentist appointment—it sucks and is to be avoided at all costs.  For some people the vacation doesn't officially end until the key turns on their front door again, but for me the end has always been the beginning of the journey home.  That's when you start to let all of the things you needed a vacation from in the first place creep back into your mind and the panic sets in.  Those e-mails in your inbox that you were happy to let fester for a few days are now stinking to high heaven.  The to-do list you didn't quite knock off completely before you left is awaiting your return, and it appears to have found a way to procreate asexually in your absence.  The journey home is also when the retrospective on the vacation itself begins.  These vacation autopsies are a necessary evil which inevitably carry a strong bias towards the unavoidable negatives that every trip suffers.   Did you have fun?  Did you spend your time as wisely as you could have?  Did you see everything you meant to see?  Did you spend way too much money?  Did you forget your laptop charger in the hotel room?  I typically have asked myself these and dozens of other equally self-doubting interrogatives before the plane even pushes back from the gate.  Then somewhere around 30,000 feet comes the "If only…" statements.  "If only I'd doubled down on that eleven!"  "If only I hadn't done that tequila shot!"  "If only I spoke Japanese"  "If only we'd caught more fish!"  "If only I hadn't eaten that hot dog!" and on and on and on.  It's easy to ignore all the good things that happened, by accident or design, and focus on the things that were missed opportunities or poorly planned.  If you aren't careful, by the time your co-workers get the opportunity to ask you how your vacation was, your response will be, "It was okay."  

So somewhere over the southern half of Nebraska I'm mulling through the "If only" series and conducting the post-mortem on my week in the southwest.  I want to try to put it in some perspective that will allow me to quantitatively measure its success.  I want to decide whether I had a 5 star vacation or a 4 star vacation, a 10/10 or an 8/10.  But all I can come up with is the fact that it couldn't have really mattered less where I went or what I did so long as I met and travelled with the same people.  I had a great vacation because everywhere I went I was in excellent company.  The end of this vacation doesn't suck so bad because of all I have to do when I return or because of any of the things that went wrong in the last week, the end of this vacation is awful because I'm traveling at 477 knots in the opposite direction of all of the people I just spent it with.