My Summer (Kind of) Vacation
My wife and I took a long-overdue vacation to Los Angeles, our home away from home away from home. We missed our friends and our all the classic Los Angeles experiences, like the 405 and Poquito Mas. However, we didn’t quite stay true to the vacation concept, instead cleverly scheduling our trip around work-based commitments.
After all, vacations feel like a trick. Avoid all the responsibilities of adulthood? Waste your days away with nothing but aggressive eating and lollygagging? No thank you. All that fantasy free-time turns into headaches when you get back home and to reality, where life continued on without you, nothing fell apart, and everyone is replaceable.
I had to take steps to hang onto that corporate tether. While my wife’s programming class was heading into something called “finals” week, I signed up to meet up with some of my company’s West Coast partners.
I’ve always enjoyed stacking my time. I feel like I’m not just making an accomplishment, but a super-accomplishment. Efficiency plays a huge role in my life as an unhealthy, yet completely satisfying virtue. And, we all know that the word that comes to the minds of pretty much everyone when they hear vacation? It’s efficiency!
As we walked to the taxi in our driveway, I thought to myself, wow, exactly 5:30am! A perfect start to a perfect adventure. Then we arrived at the airport, got some coffee, and awaited the fun that no doubt came soon.
As they called the boarding zones, I suddenly felt awful. Not from the fear of leaving my comfortable routine behind. Not from the crushing pressure of making it the perfect vacation. Not from the sudden reality of trapping myself in a middle seat on a plane full of coughing sweat bags and hell babies. No, this misery came from good, old-fashioned stomach infection.
Even though I managed to ride it out from the confines of seat 34B, my illness worsened throughout the day. By the end of the first day of vacation, I paid a visit to the local urgent care center to make sure I would not need to put my affairs in order just yet. I soon discovered they would not take my insurance when they immediately flipped me upside down and shook me to empty my pockets. Thus began our tour of the urgent care centers of the San Fernando Valley, in an effort to find a doctor that accepted insurance from a fly-over state.
It was starting to get late, and all the urgent care centers were pulling down their shades and locking the doors as we sprinted towards them. We decided to accept defeat, and turned our sights on the dreaded emergency room. Since this place was part of the famous LA-based Cedars-Sinai chain of hospitals, I expected star-level service. I even imagined someone like George Clooney and Anthony Edwards dramatically rushing in to throw me on a stretcher and save my life, which obviously would never happen, because they work at a hospital in Chicago. Instead, the best the hospital could do was assign me a doctor that loosely resembled Stanley Tucci.
They took my blood and didn’t even leave a tip! After all that, it turns out my 24-hour infection would soon fade away, and all I would get out of it was a luxury-sized copay.
The next day, I took a nice leisurely trip to the local coffee shop for some New Orleans style coffee and some writing, recalibrating myself into a vacation brain space. That is, until I realized I had better confirm my upcoming meetings and jump on that conference call with the tech team in New Jersey.
I spent the rest of the vacation zig-zagging like the Road Runner through West LA, Orange County, and back into downtown LA, and then all the way up to San Jose and Silicon Valley, giving me the true California Highway experience, with several productive work meetings along the way.
Not all was lost though in the vacation category, spending a few hours with some fabulous friends, and indulging ourselves with ice-blended coffees, tacos, sushi, and the transcendent pleasures of honey lavender ice cream.
When we returned home, we were happy to see our chows Basie and Steffi again and get back into our normal routine. But, our dogs didn’t seem overly excited to see us from the kennel. In fact their report cards made it clear they enjoyed their stay with the delightful staff at the Morton Grove Animal Hospital.
Message received, Basie. Everyone is replaceable.