My Life Ambition

I have to confess that although I don’t mind working, the thought of going on a really, really long vacation is very appealing. I’m talking about taking at least a year off to travel the world and just enjoy life. Sounds idyllic? Read on.

My dream is to buy a luxury bus, outfitted like a first-class hotel suite: plush carpets, mahogany trim, marble bathroom, leather seats, comfy couches and all that. Then I’d drive the bus around the world, never needing to worry about packing, unpacking, checking in or checking out. I’d go where I wanted and enjoy hot showers, home-cooked meals and top-rate comfort in the middle of the city, desert, rainforest or mountain peak.

For that I’d need a bus license, a whole bunch of free time and a lazy $250,000 to purchase the vehicle. It is not a dream out of range, assuming I sold my house, quit my job, took a loan and sent my kids to live with an elderly wart-ridden aunt in a dilapidated mansion on the top of a dark, distant hill in a wooded forest. Okay, the last part is not essential. It doesn’t have to be a wooded forest.

Then I’d have to buy a beaver.

That’s one sentence that you weren’t expecting. "I’d have to buy a beaver". Actually, that would be a “Beaver”, which is the name of one of the companies that sells luxury motor homes. “Beaver”, as in www.beavermotorcoaches.com.

“Get into a Beaver” is their catch-phrase, which, taken literally, conjures up images of large, brown rodents holding their buck-toothed mouths wide open and pointing with their free paw down their gullets as they garble, “Get in, already!”

But I like that slogan, “Get into a Beaver”. Think of the newly retired couple stopping off at a gas-station in the remotest part of an Arizona desert. The husband goes to the cashier to pay for the diesel, feels his back pocket, turns to his wife and says, “Dear, I think I left my wallet in the Beaver. Would you mind getting it for me?”

“Get out of the fish!” is another sentence you didn’t expect to read here, but then again, you just did. It’s also a sentence that I never thought I’d utter, but I managed to say it often, making perfect sense each time. “The fish” referred to an inflatable swimming-pool toy in the shape of a fish and that the “get out” was directed to various children so that the other children could have a turn.

My life ambition is to sit in a fish inside a Beaver – and the scary thing is that you now understand exactly what I mean.

The Ultimate Vacation

Where did you go for your last vacation? Disneyland? Hawaii? Europe? Colin went to Mongolia. He wrote about it in his most fascinating blog, creatively titled "Colin's Mongolian Adventure". Let's not knock Colin. He went to a different destination - to a place where he could see something new and exciting, to challenge himself and come back with engaging stories and lasting memories. I hope Colin doesn't mind if I reproduce a small section of his blog:

To summarize, everything in Mongolia can accurately be explained by merely adding the words "Crazy Mongolian" at the beginning of the name. (E.g. Crazy Mongolian bus drivers; Crazy Mongolian jungle birds; Crazy Mongolian construction workers; and Crazy Mongolian liver diseases.)

This is truly the best I can explain the country.

After all the planning, effort and expense he put into his adventure-trip to Mongolia, the best way he can summarize the place is to call the people "crazy"? Whatever would Gengis Kahn think of Mongolia's hard-earned reputation? "Crazy", indeed! He would be rolling in his grave if he read that. But I thought we weren't going to knock Colin. Let's face it, at lest he left his comfort zone and did something interesting, even if his summary of the whole experience is a little short on adjectives.

It seems to me, though, that the reason most people want to go away on a vacation is either for: luxury (think 6 star Hawaiian resort hotel), fun (think Disneyland), quiet (picture deserted tropical beaches, fine, white sand and exquisite solitude) or adventure (backpacking in Europe, a ride down the Amazon, or an African safari). I think the last category of people get the most out of their vacation. Adventurers get to meet interesting people, enjoy fascinating experiences and contract exotic diseases.

I bet that the ultimate adventure holiday would be a trip to space. According to this short piece on www.space.com, "on April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito, a California-based multi-millionaire, became the first ever space tourist". Mr Tito boarded a Russian spacecraft and then spent two weeks on the International Space Station.

Now that has to be the ultimate vacation.

Firstly, you have the excitement of the buildup. You are sent to a secret Russian camp to learn how to survive lack of gravity, oxygen deprivation and G-forces that push your face through to the back of your head. Then you pay millions of dollars and trust your life to a spacecraft made by a country that can't even produce a decent automobile. You then leave your spacecraft and live in an isolated metal box called a space station, which is basically a fragile pod equivalent to a tiny, vulnerable Lego construction, delicately floating in a great ocean of nothingness. You then spend two weeks getting in the way of a bunch of nervous scientists, hoping that the oxygen doesn't run out, that equipment doesn't malfunction, that asteroids don't crush you while you sleep, that food rations don't get accidentally shot out of an airlock, that aliens don't attack, or that the pilot for your return trip doesn't lose the keys to the spaceship. I can think of nothing more fun than that.

Tito's 2-week jaunt on the International Space Station in 2001 hasn't yet spawned a space-hotel industry. Despite the predictions (or fantasies) of futurists, techies and trekies alike, space-station hotels are still a long way off. A less-than-thrilling article by Leonard David entitled, "The Future of Travel: Aquatic to Cosmic Destinations" quotes an "expert" who says, "You can't have a successful hotel if you don't have the means of getting people there." How cleverly insightful.

Fortunately or unfortunately, at least for now, the majority of us are limited to searching for more Earthly adventures. So next time you feel like a break from the drudgery of life, either borrow a couple of million, learn Russian and bunk down with the Cosmonauts, or do what Colin did and find something different, like climbing Mount Everest using only a ball of string and a toothpick.

Send me a postcard.