Back from vacation...

... or starting a new one. :-)

Vacationing with the family is always a fun time, but the disruption of schedule, including sleep, is a hard one to deal with sometimes. I'm not taking about the kids. For the most part they're back to their ol' happy, normal selves. I, on the other hand...

While my employer was shut down last weekend, we took the opportunity to head down south to North Carolina for a visit with my mother-in-law. After a 12 hour ride in the car, we were all exhausted. The kids compensated for this exhaustion, by exerting any last remaining adrenaline they could muster and stayed up for another several hours before crashing, and then waking up at, as my wife would say, "the butt-crack of dawn."

My mother-in-law lives almost as far from civilization as you can go without falling off the edge of the globe. Well, OK, not really, but she lives far up in the mountains, quite a distance from any McDonald's, Walmart or other store you might know by name. The last 15 miles to her cabin is literally switch-back after switch-back after switchback. That's all fine and dandy. But all this seclusion comes at a price -- actually a rather reasonable one if you're interested in renting her cabin apartment as you travel. But I digress... The price, as far as I'm concerned, is the several days it takes me to get over the fact that if something happens, the nearest hospital is who knows how far away. It takes me quite awhile to fall asleep. "Did we remember the Epi-Pen for my son?" "Did I set the parking brake?" "Was that a branch or a bear shadow I just saw?" All of these "non-sensical" things kept shooting through my mind, preventing sleep. I often would have to drown those thoughts with mind-numbing television (thank goodness for satellite TV) and pure exhaustion before I could fall into at least a fitful sleep. So much for using vacations to rest and rejuvenate.

It's all good, nonetheless. I'm glad for the time with family.