The experience of that trip was summed up and symbolized by a hat. I’d felt in serious need of a good hat for this trip, the sort of hat you couldn’t buy but could only be given. On the drive down, Jim obliged by handing me a truly excellent bit of headgear he’d gotten off a roadie in George Thorogood’s R&B band. It was one of those adjustable ball caps, all black except for the white outline of and electric guitar and the word Destroyers. Except to sleep and swim, I don’t think I took that hat off once in four days. It came to represent anew, changed self, a vacation self. Wearing it gave me the feeling that I’d actually gone somewhere. When I got home, I took the hat off and hung it on a chair. It’ll stay there until that old vacation self comes back.
The thing is this: When you take your whole family along, it makes it all the more difficult to open yourself up to the unexpected, to take risks, to hang one over the edge. A typical family vacation is usually just a matter of transporting all your old habits and attitudes (plus half your possessions) to a new location, generation huge credit-card bills and then going home. In order to escape a daily routine that’s overscheduled, stressed-out and fraught with goals and deadlines, for instance, we’ll go someplace like Disney World, which requires a 150-page guidebook. We emerge fundamentally unchanged from this experience, except for being more tired than ever—and poorer. The real agenda behind these vacations, in fact, is not about being changed at all but about avoiding change.