We can bottle, freeze-dry, package, can, concentrate and shrink-wrap anything. You name it, we can vacuum pack-it. We can seal it up nice and fresh. Ready to open at a later date. Enjoy!
So with all of our technology, with all of our ingenuity and know-how — all of the means at our disposal! — why hasn’t anyone thought to bottle a vacation? I’m sure it’s doable. And incredibly lucrative for the successful inventor. I would buy it. I would pay almost any amount of money for it.
Well, if that amount of money was $6.52. That’s about what I have left after a 10-day vacation to the mountains of North Carolina.
I’m a week back from that wonderful, amazing, soul-refreshing, rock-climbing, stream-dashing, gem-finding, deer-spying, flying squirrel-flying (not sure where that last one came from) curvy road-riding vacation, and I am longing to be back there. Free from the reality and the pressure and the stress that is real life.
How I would love to go into the refrigerator right now, grab a can of vacation and pop the top. Just stand there in the kitchen soaking up its wonderful effervescence. Returning to that vacation state of mind.
“Ahhhh, mountain air, take me away!”
Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t you buy that? Right now millions of Americans are returning from vacations, struggling to re-acclimate themselves to the routines of regular life. Grocery shopping. Bed making. Bill paying. Waking up at a normal hour to go to work. Remembering that drinking beer at two in the afternoon is frowned upon.
It would spare us from the post-vacation blues. The travel hangover. That dark, sour mood that overcomes us when we get back, causing us to collapse in a heap on the sofa and watch re-runs of “Who’s the Boss?”
If we had a machine that could bottle that feeling — that could bring back that mojo for us — well, it would make millions.
Just something to capture that sensation — that feeling! — of being on vacation. How everything smells better. Tastes better. How your shoulders detach from your earlobes and move again. Freedom! How you can sit outside in your boxer shorts drinking coffee and if anyone says anything, you can say, “Oh yeah! Sue me …
I’m on vacation!” And legally they can’t sue you, because you ARE on vacation, and they get it, and they sigh and wish they were sitting there in boxer shorts drinking coffee and flaunting it. They need the “Vacation Vacuum-packer 3000” too. See? I just gave it a name. Now I just need someone to make it.
Anyone out there? Anyone able to bring this product to market? For the good of the nation? For the struggling masses returning to reality? Desperate. Broke. Terrified of what their email inboxes look like. Terrified of what a refrigerator they forgot to clean out before they left looks like.
Oh, if only there were such a device. But alas, until the great inventor comes along, we will all just have to dream, and long for those cool, carefree days we’ve left behind.
Goodbye vacation state of mind, I hardly knew thee.