Vacations with Ben

Sometimes vacations with Ben seem like a long string of meals. Go for a walk, but be back in time for breakfast. Lie by the pool until it’s time for lunch. Take a nap, walk on the beach, pass the time until we dress for dinner.

Ben likes his vacations simple. They are the vacations of a working urbanite who puts in long hours, leaving for the office before daylight and returning home after sunset. They don’t strain the imagination; they don’t demand heightened senses of awareness in strange surroundings. They are filled with golf, swimming pools and dining rooms. They are perfect for a man who has plenty of excitement at work: deadlines, breaking news stories, difficult sources, complaining readers.

It took me a long time to get used to this kind of vacationing. My family didn’t do vacations much, and certainly not vacations in high-end hotels with fancy restaurants and more than one pool. I remember two or three vacations as a kid: a camping trip to Wisconsin, about six hours away from our Iowa home; one to the Lake of the Ozarks, to a cabin on the lake with the sound of waves breaking outside the windows, a sound that kept me awake all night. I think there might have been another one, but I’m not sure it wasn’t the same as the Ozarks trip.

Ben’s family didn’t go to expensive hotels, either, but he does remember the anticipation of driving into the parking lot of Howard Johnsons or Holiday Inns on family vacations, the anticipation of a hotel pool and vending machines. He remembers driving to the family cabin in Northern Wisconsin and spending hours in a fishing boat on the lake, relaxing, far from the hectic world of the Chicago advertising agencies where his father worked. I understand why his father wanted peace and quiet, and why Ben does too. (And then, there was his mother, whom I invited to go on a cruise to Alaska with me shortly after his father died. “Why would I want to go somewhere I haven’t been before?” she asked, absolutely seriously.)

I’ve learned to accept these laid back vacations – even enjoy them – because they aren’t the only vacations I take. My own sense of the perfect vacation has no origin I can put a finger on: it probably was the simple result of wanting to get out of a small town in Iowa, and go as far away as humanly possible. I travel with my friends to places that Ben wouldn’t find relaxing: Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia. They are full of suspense and surprise. Occasionally, they require cunning: we get ourselves into a fix and have to put our wits together to get out of it.

When Janet, my favorite traveling companion, and I travel together, mealtimes are often unwelcome necessities. We put them off as long as possible. The food is usually poor and bland, and I don’t have enough fingers to count the times I have come home with campylobacter or salmonella poisoning from eating abroad. Janet comes home with respiratory distress; I come home with intestinal parasites.

This is not to say that I don’t like to eat when I’m on vacation with Ben. I eat way too much. I love food. I weigh at least 20 pounds more than I should because of it. But, sometimes, after a week on vacation with my husband, I start to dread mealtimes. I’m not hungry. Still, I can’t skip them, because they are the only excitement of the day – the only moments of discovery and sensory stimulation.

Yesterday was such a day. Today was too. The difference between the two is that the sun finally came out today, and finally, Hawaii looked like the Hawaii of postcards. We lay by the pool, ordering beers and screwdrivers, slipping into the water whenever we got too warm. We read. We talked a little. At some point, we agreed it was time for lunch. Now, I am reading and writing while Ben takes a nap.

Tonight, we will have dinner at Dardano’s a restaurant in the Grand Hyatt Kauai, where we are staying, and it will be excellent. I will fall asleep shortly after dinner, comatose with the carbohydrates of pasta and wine. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I will wake up, thanks to the red wine, and take a couple of Advils to go back to sleep.

Later this week, I will return to Seattle tan and rested, and Ben, I hope, will too.