Down the Rabbit Hole

Vacation? What's Vacation?

30 Day Blogging Challenge
PROMPT May 5th
If your job gave you a surprise seven day paid break to rest and recuperate, what would you do with those seven days?

My current vacation day balance is 349 hours...just over 43 days. In a standard year, one not plagued by covid, I barely manage to take a week straight off. My vacation time does not rollover so if I fail to use it, which I always do, its lost to the great never-was...along with some of my soul.
My office is understaffed but what's more, I'm the only individual who knows how to do my job. Prior to the pandemic, I spent almost two years training an assistant, someone who could back me up in case of emergencies...(or vacations!) and then sadly, COVID hit and the company had to lay her off due to lack of work. No one was thinking about buying aircraft when the world was virtually closed for months and months.

My job, my career...is a bit of sore spot for me these days. I've grown up in this industry and I think I live and work a lot of the edge of perpetual burnout. I'm not in a good headspace and I feel like this prompt could easily verve off into a briar patch of bitching and complaining - who needs that?!

To focus on the strictly positive then...I have booked our family vacation. We are going to Cape for a week in August. It is our happy place and after missing out last summer, my family is really looking forward to exploring the dunes and beaches of the National Seashore, shark watching and taking in the sites and sounds and shops of Commercial Street in P-Town. We are counting the days. I know that the minute we pass through Wellfleet, I will begin to smell the salt flats of Truro and my soul will start to heal in all the rough places. I know that when I climb the observation tower and look over that beach forest landscape where the white dunes give way to the wide expanse of the deep blue Atlantic ocean, my heart will be overcome with gratitude once again. We will spend our days with our toes in the sand and our nights eating ice cream and watching street musicians and drag queens dance. I love that each year we ask our daughter where she wants to go and year after year she says the Cape without a moments hesitation. She obviously feels the same pull as I do.