Billy Collins Sunday - Consolation

Consolation from Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House)

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off

down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

From vacation in 2009 - Welsh countryside

I've been experiencing a bit of wanderlust lately.  Maybe it's because I've been reading books set in far away landscapes or because it's been three years since my last transatlantic trip.  Or perhaps it is because it's almost August in DC which means that almost everyone in town is headed out of town. Probably though, it's because I need a vacation.

The first definition of vacation in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is "a respite or time of respite from something."  I like the ambiguity of that particular definition because that's how I'm feeling.  I need a respite from . . .something. 

Do I need vacation from
Inspectors Lewis and Hathaway?

What that something is though, I can't quite put my finger on, which makes for difficult planning.  Do I need to get away from it all (or just a little bit of it) for a day or two?  Or would a "staycation" suffice?  Is it new stimuli I'm craving-- people watching at cafes, wandering through old churches, strolling through art galleries?  Or maybe it's just little things from which I need a vacation-- British detective shows, Facebook, the same old breakfast every morning.  I'm really not sure.

So in the next few weeks while my friends are off on cruises down the Danube or strolling the streets of Istanbul, I'll be here, taking consolation in the lighter than usual traffic and maybe, eventually, taking a respite from something.