Coming down.

It is said that all good things must come to an end.  This holds true, unfortunately, for vacations and The Vacation High.  After living freely for a few days on vacation, the inevitable end arrives.  This is where you must come down from The Vacation High.

For me it begins the night before departure.  If we’re staying at a hotel or other rented space the check-out time is usually around 11am so some preparations must be done the night before.  Dirty clothes must be gathered and all belongings accounted for.  The place that you called home for a few days and nights is no longer yours.  Time to pack your bags and get on with your normal life.  Once the day of departure arrives it’s helter-skelter to get the bags repacked and back into the car.  This is usually a process since you always leave with more than you came with.  Dirty clothing takes up so much more space than clean clothing does.  And there are always souvenirs.

Once everything is in the car, you check-out and then you see your bill.  It’s always more than you expect because of crazy taxes and fees.  So that’s always a downer.  Then begins the drive home which is always, for some reason, much faster than the drive there.  Although I’m always happy about having a successful trip, the drive home is never a happy time for anyone.  We want to be back where we were with the people we were with doing the fun things we were doing.  But instead we’re headed back to reality.

The hardest part about coming down from The Vacation High for me is the laundry.  I need a better system.  What usually happens is that the dirty laundry is repacked into individual suitcases.  Then when we get home I have to go through everyone’s bag to get the dirty clothes.  Then I have to sort them and wash them.  For some reason, this takes me days.  Case in point, we returned home from our last vacation on Sunday night.  I have still yet to finish washing all of the dirty laundry.  Oh and don’t even mention the unpacked bags that are still strewn about the house.  They’ll get put away one of these days.  But that feeling of excitement and anticipation has left me.  I’ve come down from my high.  As Soul II Soul sang back in the 80s “Back to life, back to reality.”