Boring Holidays

Why Family Vacations Are So Boring

And how to get out of them

My next door neighbour stopped going on holiday years ago.

‘How did you get out of it?’ I once asked him.

He smiled profoundly, ‘I got divorced.’

It’s not that I don’t like a holiday. When I’m sitting by the pool reading a thriller and drinking rum, it’s not too bad.

It’s just getting there I dislike. The planning, the decision-making, the booking, the spending money, the buying of shorts and T-shirts I’ll never wear again. Then there’s asking the boss for my two weeks off. A process he always makes difficult because he doesn’t have time for a vacation. Lucky bastard!

Then I have to organize someone to water the garden inside and out, feed the cat, tell everyone we’re on holiday (I don’t know why that’s important), and finally check my will is in order. Very important! Each time I step on an airplane, I solemnly believe it’ll be my last few hours on Earth.

I can see why travel agents sprang up. They ease the burden of travel, but they don’t ease the suffering. They might organize the logistics, but they don’t organize the mundane. They don’t pack your bags, or check you’ve got enough socks for two weeks of hard sweating.

Neither do they check that the hotel mattresses are clean. Have you ever looked under the sheets of a hotel mattress? Don’t! You’ll never sleep in another bed apart from your own again.

Furthermore, a travel agent can’t compensate me for the loss of my routine. A routine that for 50 weeks a year is so streamlined, so precise, that NASA uses it to recalibrate their atomic clocks with.

‘Hi guys, I’m just about to pour my second coffee, so it’s 08:43:51 precisely. But don’t phone next week, I’m on vacation!’

‘Shucks, can’t you get out of it?’

I normally try by making a last minute appeal to my wife that I had a very bad dream. Involving planes. Unfortunately, they’ve heard it all before, so I start packing.

Holidays would be better if there were no other holidaymakers. No other people crowding up the lifts and lobbies, bars and restaurants, the pool and the gym.

Then there’s the banal conversation.

‘Hey, fellow holidaymaker. Where are you from?’

‘Same place as you,’ I reply. ‘We live in the same town. I see you at Walmart every week, but we don’t say anything because we don’t know each other. Only now we feel we have to speak to one another because we’re on holiday. And I don’t mean to be rude, but I hope I never see you again.’

As a result, our family ends up being ostracized from the rest of the hotel, and our kids don’t make any friends. But that’s the price they pay for having a miserable bastard for a father.

I once went to Venice alone after my first marriage collapsed, only to bump into a guy I knew at school, Mark Saunders, on my first night in the hotel.

‘Hey! Phil! Fancy seeing you here.’

I ended up spending an agonizing meal with his racist wife and two Nazi memorabilia obsessed sons, who were eating their pasta with what looked like a couple of SS engraved forks. If the waiter had offered me a syringe full of cyanide instead of another Tiramisu, I’d have taken it.

The next day, I begged the hotel manager to find me another hotel. Anything! A hostel full of college kids sniffing glue would be fine.

He understood my situation perfectly, and not only did he find me a hotel and refund my unused nights, but paid for a Gondola to take me there. Turned out to be the best holiday ever.

It’s not that I don’t love my family — I do. But it’s difficult for loners to go on family holidays. By definition, family holidays mean being with people. This is where I go wrong.

At the airport, I normally give them the option: ‘Why don’t you just go without me, I’ll stay here. You’ll be happier.’

‘You are their father,’ my wife growls, ‘and fathers go on vacation with their children. This isn’t Venice you know.’

My wife always brings this up — that best vacation ever! — so I cave in and say: ‘Of course, I’m looking forward to it. Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.’

‘Good,’ my wife grins. ‘Because I saw Mark Saunders in Walmart a few days ago, and as luck would have it, he’s going to the same resort. Look, he’s over there.’

I glance across to Mark Saunders dressed in a cheap Walmart linen suit, flanked by his now hideously fat wife, and even more evil looking grown-up sons.

And you wonder why I hate vacations.

Thanks for reading this holiday comedy. What more fun?

Even more funny?