Our vacation over, we stopped for lunch before our drive home from the airport.  As we were sitting there, three ladies, probably ten or more years older than us and full of character, walked past us to their table.  I tried not to laugh out loud as I overheard one of the ladies say to another, “don’t argue with me – we’re on vacation!”.

Vacations are an interesting thing.  Meant for relaxation or an escape from the everyday, vacations can be wonderful or horrible, depending on who you’re with.  Oh sure, there are circumstances that arise that are unexpected but no matter what you do or where you go, the people you go with really dictate how good your vacation will be.

I have been on vacations with my parents, my kids, my mom AND my kids, my in-laws, my colleagues and my friends.  And the one person I love going on vacation with the most is my best friend, my sometimes colleague and my husband.  Even on our first vacation – our honeymoon – we just had fun wherever we went, either agreeing or compromising on where we wanted to go or what we wanted to see or do.  We just enjoyed being together, no matter what we were doing.  I mean, we had fun trying to guess the composer listening to the classical music station on our wedding night.  Pretty nerdy, but fun!

We usually have one of two kinds of vacations – the vacation where you stay in one place and veg out on a beach somewhere or the kind where you do the marathon to see how many activities and sightseeing you can stuff into your days.  It depends on what kind of year we’ve had that dictates whether or not we want to stay put or run around, but this year we actually combined the two in two very close but very different locales. Most of our week we spent in a great little town two blocks from the beach where we could walk to just about everything and the last two days were spend in L.A. trying to do as many things as we could without killing ourselves.

My husband tends to be the sit on the beach kind of guy and I’m the let’s go out and do something kind of girl so it’s interesting combining the two.  I found myself slowing down and really thinking while I was at the beach where there were not a lot of distractions.  There was an appreciation for those God things – the stars over our deck at night, the sound of the waves on the beach, the smell of the salt water, the feel of the sand and sun, the beautiful plants, flowers and trees.  A morning spent in a speed boat on the ocean where the cool wind whipped our hair and where we bounced on the waves while marveling at literally hundreds of dolphins almost within arms reach was just not long enough.

Walking everywhere gave us time to notice details in the everyday and we found ourselves saying hello to people sitting on their front porches.  The ability to take a nap in the afternoon with all the doors and windows open and the breeze working with the fans made for some major relaxing.  It was the kind of place where you daydream about retiring, spending time taking care of your garden, walking to the beach, meeting with friends to play games on your deck or porch.

Then we Ubered it to L.A.  We stayed right in the heart of the city, just down (and I mean DOWN)  the street from the Disney Music Hall.  The walk up the huge hill to the hall with all of its traffic and honking, the tall buildings, the large numbers of people dashing here and there was in direct contrast to what we had just left and yet such an adventure.  It wasn’t so much the God things that caught your attention here but the creativity of man.  It was in the architecture, the art and the food.  You saw it in forms of transportation and in the way people used it to do everyday things, like someone doing food deliveries on an electric unicycle.

We experienced film history in many different ways from Grauman’s Chinese Theater to the back lots of Warner Brothers.  Films and TV make you feel a connection to people that you’ve never met and so you take a picture with the hand and footprints of Judy Garland, stand in the same gazebo as Lorilei Gilmore or gaze at costumes once worn by Audrey Hepburn.

Yes, it’s all very magical until reality sets in and someone sends an email that reminds you that school and work are waiting for you when you get back.  It was the only time when we got the tiniest bit cranky, but then we reminded each other that until we arrived home, we were still on vacation and as Scarlet O’Hara said, after all, tomorrow is another day.  Life is good.