Holiday Week

Dearest Rachel –

One of the strange effects of being retired and out of the work farce is that I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of current trends. If people are doing things en masse, I’m not always aware of it – or if I am, it’s a very dim awareness, based on something I may catch in passing at the corner of my eye.

Last Saturday, while I was at the gym, I was looking up at the screens over the storefront picture window. As per usual, they were tuned to the various news stations in the area, and well, I forget whether multiple channels had the same story going on at the same time, it did come up that that day was expected to be the busiest travel day of the year. Which struck me as odd, because you might remember how the busiest travel day of the year always happened to be the day or two before Thanksgiving. What was going on? When did this change?

To be sure, this might have been a case where the day was the busiest day thus far of the year, which would make much more sense. After all, with summer just coming into full swing, and a holiday coming up, what better time to make a week out of things and get out of town?

Then again, that begs the question of the previous holiday weekend; aren’t most schools already out by Memorial Day these days? Why wouldn’t that day see more traffic than this one? And for that matter, Independence Day is closer to the upcoming weekend than the past one, in any event; why would last weekend be so busy? I would understand better if the holiday was smack dab in the middle of the week, making the question of “which weekend to take off?” more of a toss-up, but this seems to lean that much more obviously toward the later one.

Then again, when would you leave for such a holiday? No one wants to be traveling on July 4th (although I would imagine that a night flight over the country would be spectacular, especially if you were headed west and had a window seat; you’d be crossing the country as each city and town shot off their respective fireworks displays); you’d want to be at your destination by then. And if you’re going to take a day or two off beforehand, you might as well jus splash out and take the whole week, especially since one of them is already being paid for, being a national holiday and all that. And with that being decided, there’s no sense in wasting the weekend that you already have off; why not use it for the purpose of getting to that destination you have in mind?

So, okay, I guess I get it after all; the Saturday before Independence Day would be a big summertime travel day. I’m not a fan of it, though.

Maybe it’s a reaction to when I was working for that Japanese company; it always bothered me that the entire country practically shut down during that first week or so of May for what they referred to as “Golden Week.” Now, don’t get me wrong; everyone deserves a break from the work farce now and again. Heck, Europe looks at both the Americas and Asia with some disdain, in that neither of our cultures take enough of a break to properly recover from the efforts of our labor (then again, we might easily snap back by asserting that, thanks to their current work ethic, they haven’t accomplished nearly as much as we have over the past century or so in comparison). But when everyone takes a break at the same time, it isn’t really that much of a break.

Consider the madness of an entire country traveling to various vacation destinations all at ones. Start with the highways, airports and train stations (less so that last one here in America, but that just puts more of a crush on the first two) being insanely crowded, and then compound it with the masses that the traveler arrives to find. Where does one eat? Where does one stay? How does one enjoy oneself, when everything involves a long queue or even more limited personal space than back at home? This isn’t “getting away from it all,” when “it all” came with one.

Of course, one can’t pick and choose when holidays happen. And there are certain things that go on over the holidays that just don’t during the off-season; festivals are crowded – uncomfortably so, in my opinion – but they’re supposed to be. They draw and feed off the crowds; without them, they cease to exist.

So while I will probably continue to travel during more off-season times if I can, I certainly understand that one has to take one’s opportunities – both as offered by one’s job, and as enticed by the various destinations that folks flock to – when they’re offered. If it means that the holiday week is insanely crowded and busy, well… that’s just how things are. For my part, I’ll probably be spending the week on the sidelines, marveling at the masses as they mill about this way and that, and trying to stay out of the way of the worst of the stampede.

And with that having been said, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.