Measuring a Vacation in Memories

The counter person with the dark visor looked at me carefully, "You were here last night."

Yes, I was. We had driven south during Christmas break searching for sand, shells, and sunsets, and at the end of the trip found instead snow, ice, and sub-zero temperatures. We stopped at the McDonald's the night before in Vandalia, IL. about 100 miles south our intended destination. After a quiet night of reconfiguring our plans, we now were up at daybreak to begin our push for home: that is why we were back at the McDonald's.

"Large coffee, black, and bottled water."

"Same thing you ordered last night." The counter person was polite and efficient last night when we were tired, and, twelve hours later, she was just as adept. She also had a good memory.

"That's right."

The trinkets and t-shirts you buy from vendors, attractions you gawk at, and images you snap and store in scrapbooks and smartphone albums are the grand strokes of any vacation. But, what makes any trip really successful are the unexpected experiences that fill in the lines between the paint-by-number outline of a vacation drawn by trip planners. These unplanned moments are found from dealing with people, most of them low wage workers, who wait on you in restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores, state park kiosks, toll booths, and hotel front desks. To their credit, most of them will go out of their way to help you have a good trip. It doesn't cost them much to be kind, and, I like to believe, most people do try to be kind.

Each moment of honest person-to-person contact when you travel -- eye contact, a smile, a greeting in the morning, remembering your order from the night before -- creates as strong a memory of a trip as birds flitting in and out of a rolling surf or the stolid brick and earth battlements of a Civil War coastal fortress. Author Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote, "We are here to change the world with small acts of kindness rather than one great breakthrough."

So sure, I will remember Spanish moss hanging like Christmas tinsel from the southern pines, seafood lasagna, and the "Beware of Alligator" signs along walking paths in the salt marshes, but I will also remember other incidental moments. I will remember, for example, the pre-teen who scrupulously checked out our purchases from the main street bookstore under the watchful eye of her grandmother/owner, the hotel custodian who pointed out that the dot and dash on the horizon was a 600-foot nuclear sub leaving its Georgia base on New Year's Eve, and the diner hostess who showed us a YouTube clip insisting it was proof of a "real" mermaid: after all, it was on the Internet. A vacation is measured by those small bits of memories, not by miles driven.

The counter person poured out my coffee, capped the cup, and pulled out a chilled water out of a cooler.

"Where's home?"

"Green Bay, Wisconsin."

"Long drive." She added, "Happy memories."

"Thanks." Thanks to all of you, I have them.