seperate vacation

The real goal of a vacation is to get that feeling of actually having been somewhere, of having temporarily taken leave of your everyday life. But that sensation is an interior experience, a matter of the heart, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with pending lots of money or even physically going someplace. You can spend a week in Cancun but somehow never get away. “Getting away” has more to do with getting away from yourself, or at least from your obligations, and neither of those things has anything to do with geography.
Which is why occasionally taking a vacation free of wife and family is almost automatically magic. You’re stripping away all your ordinary, task-specific selves—father, husband, lover, slave of children—as if you were shedding a series of overcoats. You’re breaking free of the thousand daily reminders that keep all those selves intact and just walking away from the whole thing. That’s when the trip begins.
When you take your family along, though, it’s almost like loading your whole house on your back. You’re taking the thousand daily reminders right along with you. (A friend of mine rented a villa in Italy and took his entire family there for the summer but came back in a few weeks because the whole experience was just like home, only immeasurably more difficult.)