Gary asked me this weekend what vacation I would go on if we could go on vacation, and I had no answer. It surprised me that I had no answer, because if he'd asked me two years ago I would have said "Venice Ireland Yukon Pacific Northwest."
It also surprised me that he asked, because when we are granted the gift of pleasant weather on a weekend I still have to drag him out of the house, even if it’s just to do yard work at his parents’. It seems a sin to me to waste good weather. Last weekend. when I went to a party, the opera, and the art museum while he stayed home, he behaved as if I was abandoning him.
I hope this stay-at-home mentality isn't the next stop on the inexorable march to old age. Werthers, birding, then agoraphobia? Or is it Werthers, birding, knitting THEN agoraphobia? If that's so I just have to never take up knitting.
Not having oodles of vacation destinations in your head could be a good sign that you are not wanting to escape your life, maybe? (also: because of Yukon Gold potatoes, I initially thought that was one place - somewhere in the PNW, probably near Idaho - that I'd never heard of. But while Idaho has a lot of weird, it does not have a simultaneous Venice and Ireland, I suspect...)
I mean, or it could be a sign of Giving Up and/or exhaustion. But often people who fantasize about lots of different other locales are doing so partly because they aren't happy with where/who they are, in a variety of different ways. (There are also people, like my sister, who just plain Have The Travel Bug; I think she'd probably go bonkers if she couldn't travel? Maybe she'd find an alternative source of stimulation and identity? But I do not have the Travel Bug, and longing-to-be-elsewhere is split between various kinds of homesickness [specific people, old-growth cedar forests, tide pools, dwarf wallabies] and then, more rarely, the wanting-to-not-be-*here* - and the latter is usually a Bad Sign, so the absence of wanting-to-not-be-*here* is a reasonably good sign as long as it's not just caused by exhaustion, for me.)
How exactly to reconcile him wanting to have you around with you wanting to go out and do while he wants to stay home and not-do, though, I do not know. *But* him wanting to have you around is probably a good marital sign, as far as it goes? (does he need some sort of service animal to both keep him company and haul his posterior outside regularly? can you train a raccoon?)
I've never heard of staving off aging by skillfully dodging learning how to knit, but you may be on to something there...
Posted by: KC | June 16, 2019 at 08:24 PM
KC - I see travel as a way to connect with humanity. I don’t want to get away from anyone or anything - I want more of what I have at home. Connecting with someone who lives in a foreign land is even more meaningful than connecting with someone in my “bubble.”
Posted by: Thequeen | June 17, 2019 at 08:22 AM
That makes sense! And is, I suspect, a more fulfilling way of traveling than the "things to see checklist" travel method. :-)
Posted by: KC | June 17, 2019 at 12:37 PM
KC - to be fair, I don’t connect with the average person, I usually connect with people who expect to deal with tourists.
Posted by: TheQueen | June 18, 2019 at 08:33 PM