Vacation Fever

Being severely affected by the vacation fever for the past few months, am slowly recovering to write this post. The attack was scheduled only for three weeks, but the symptoms existed for quite a long time before that.
Since the time I left my country, vacations play an important role in my life. It’s the big factor that keeps you going for the rest of the year. Below is the sequence of events involved in implementing a successful vacation.
1. Decide on the dates; let others at work know about it so that there are no clashes. This is normally done at the beginning of the year, when leave balances are credited.
2. Search for tickets; Login to all the websites and check out the different flights, routes and cost and book the tickets. Lesser the choice it’s easier. This step is time consuming with a huge number of airlines providing too many flights and routes; the cost varying based on the route and time. To worsen things here, all of a sudden you will find all flights are being filled like crazy in a day’s or may be even an hour’s time. Finally you land up booking the tickets based on availability. This step is normally done at least 2-3 months before.
3. Time to start shopping; Think of every person in the other part of the world and decide and shop the suitable things. Of course not to forget yourself, shop whatever you haven’t done for the past many days.
4. Inform your buddies about your trip; just thinking of a possibility of meeting up.
5. Time to think about official submission of the leave application; Now you may have to slog to avoid rejection of the application. Try to achieve near to impossible in the next one month if you got to get things right.
6. Roughly plan the trip; the visits, the movies to be watched, the malls to be visited, the pleasure trips to be arranged, the shopping to be done and what not. Everything is on the list and at this point of time it seems possible to do all this in the scheduled 3 weeks.
7. Now you are almost done with the near to impossible target, so submit the leave papers officially, praying for the right things to happen. Yes and finally it’s done.
8. Dust out your suitcases, empty the contents and dump them somewhere and start packing; Fear of excess baggage prevails until everything fits in and the baggage is weighed and checked.
Out of sheer excitement, it’s difficult to get a glimpse of sleep for at least a week before you travel. Then the big day comes, when you leave home with the luggage and your heart beats faster when you reach the airport. Flying seems to be really interesting.
Now landing at the destination, the first thought is about the return journey which will start from the same point. The time starts flying from this point and in no time you are back at the same place to board the flight for the return. This journey normally seems like a never ending one and sleeping during the entire flight becomes the only solution.
All is not over yet. Cleaning, unpacking, sharing experience and photographs continue for at least a week. Now Gear up, you got to get back to normalcy. And yes start planning for the next vacation.