The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

“So, Mom,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“So here we are. We’re strolling down the street in Leavenworth, in America, looking at German buildings. We’re eating gelato, the Italian equivalent of ice cream. I’m carrying the set of Russian dolls that I just bought, plus a hair clip and some candles from an Asian boutique. You’ve got a sack of stuff from a fair-trade shop that carries products from Africa and South America, and you’re thinking about whether to let Chris buy that sword from the Australian import store. So my question is – where do the penguins come in?”

An awkward silence followed.

“I mean, that’s all seven continents but Antarctica.”

“Oh yeah! Ha ha ha!”

We had been poking around Leavenworth for about six hours last Sunday while Chris was skiing on Mission Ridge outside of nearby Wenatchee. After navigating hilly streets, jam-packed parking lots, spontaneous mid-sidewalk clusters of fellow tourists, and barrages of each other’s lousy jokes, both of us were pretty worn out.

But in a good way.

Last weekend was my first vacation this year, and I didn’t realize how much I had needed it until I got there. The knots in my shoulders decreased in size for the first time in recorded history, and I managed to get a decent amount of sleep. And since we left our laptop at home, I didn’t feel guilty about not working on my financial aid applications. After all, I couldn’t!

I did more shopping that weekend than in any other period in my life. I am now dead broke, as well as the proud new owner of an antique rhinestone choker, a 10-pack of hibiscus-scented candles shaped like little hibiscuses (is that a word?), a cute little wooden hairclip, a set of hand painted Russian nesting dolls, and several gelato spoons. It was fun and relaxing in a way that shopping usually isn’t for me, perhaps because since I wasn’t worrying about college – which is responsible for 94.56% of all my stress – I had forgotten to worry about other things, like money.

Oh well. We can call all of them “strategic long-term investments.” Except for maybe the candles.

On the way back home, I had a sudden, chilling feeling of doom. (I’ll call it a “presentiment” in the hopes that dropping a vocabulary word will help make up for missing the first day of the new semester.) When I got home and checked my e-mail, I found a message from my remote Spanish teacher (since Spanish is an online class this year) informing me that I had bungled the formatting for an essay I submitted and that I would need to rewrite the entire thing according to a set of specifications that I had not known about the first time around.

Considering that the essay would take nearly an entire class period to rewrite, I stressed out about it for a few minutes. But then I calmed down.

After all, these things happen. But thankfully, so do vacations.