You would think this one wouldn't need a class. After all... how much trouble can a history major get into when taking an innocent family vacation? What could be the problem for a farm museum employee/part-time retail associate/homeschooling mom from the mid-west when she wants to "get away from it all" for a few days?
Leave it to me to find out ;)
Try a quick mental exercise for me. Think of the top three things people usually do when they travel for vacation....
Go ahead....
I'll wait...
But I bet your list may include some of the following activities:
1. Visiting historical sites
2. Shopping
3. Anything that is the complete opposite of what their daily life back home encompasses.
Well....I work at a farm/museum. I also work for a national retail chain. We also home school....which means my kids study strange and foreign subjects such as Latin and Logic.
In short....there is no escape... And I kind of like it.
We plan our vacation routes and travel times to take advantage of the national historic sites (known in our family as "ugh..Mom is stopping at a Brown Sign Park..a.g.a.i.n.") and museums along the way.
This time we stopped at a Civil War site where they were hosting re-enactors in period clothing (score!) and had monuments and museum displays inscribed with Latin mottoes.
Can't you just hear my children squealing with delight at the chance to show off their dead language skills???
So I played tourist and snapped the photos of the period clothing and accessories....purely for the memories of family vacation, and NOT AT ALL for further study in museum work.
Because remember, I was on vacation.
From there, we continued on to our final destination in a small, rural town in South Florida, where they apparently have these new-fangled cell phone things that my in-laws used to call and tell us that the baby goats needed to be bottle fed twice a day, the baby chicks were hatching and the donkey was about ready to have her baby.
Sigh. I was supposed to be on vacation from the farm.
Now you can imagine their shouts of joy. :) Also notice my children's impeccable use of their logic skills in agreeing to their mother's terms.
In the midst of visiting family and "relaxing" on the mini farm, we did some shopping. Our best souvenir is the orange blossom honey sold in my husband's home town. We buy as much as we can afford and then covetously hoard the liquid gold when we return to Iowa.
While making our purchase at the Honey Store, (see...touristy shopping) I glanced outside at the building across the street. The same street and historic buildings that we have been driving by for 18 years worth of visits to this town. The same town where my husband grew up. The same location across from our honey source mecca.
This time I saw the building across the street not through my 2016 retail worker's eyes, but my 1875 General Store operator's filter.
"Hey Hon.", I squeaked, in all my museum-historian-geekness. "What does that look like to you?
Yes. There it was. A 1911 General Store still in it's original location and complete with the same needed repairs as my own beloved store back in IA. We had somehow missed it's significance all these years. But now we can appreciate the importance and dignity of an original retail building standing in the same spot for all this time despite hurricanes, floods and "development progress".
So to answer my original question, NO a farm/museum employee/retail worker/ home schooling mom never gets to truly take a vacation.
But if you love what you do, you don't want to stay away from it anyway.
And since the past is all around us, affording us many educational and life lessons, we can't "get away from it all", no matter how hard we try.
Some of us even visit the modern retail gift shop to buy the tacky tourist magnet to prove it....
'cause we didn't miss the class on that ;)
