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Coprolite Newsletter, November 2007A New Kind of Vacation We just returned from a trip that we never planned to take. In fact, it was the sort of trip I have always steadfastly refused to take. And it was wonderful. There’s got to be a lesson in there someplace. For some strange reason, I’ve always remembered a line from a radio show I heard when I was in first or second grade. My mother’s favorite program back then was Vic and Sade, a daily fifteen-minute show that featured homespun comedy instead of soap-opera angst. In one episode, Vic, the husband, was asked by his boss to take a sudden business trip to some other town not terribly far away. He came home from the office to pack for the train, extremely impressed with himself for taking on this unexpected adventure. "The audacity of it all!" he kept exclaiming. "The audacity!" After my mother explained this word to me, it became one of my favorites. Well, that was what I kept saying to myself when we signed up for this trip. We had gotten a postcard advertising a river cruise down the Danube from Budapest to the Black Sea. The price was reduced to a very tempting level. "You want to do this?" I asked Mickey. "Sure!" she replied. Within a day we were signed up, and within a couple of weeks we were on a plane headed for Europe. Normally, every vacation we take is on the calendar for months ahead of time. The audacity of it all! We’ve never before taken a vacation as part of a tour group – unless you count those camping trips with our six kids about forty years ago. We’ve always made our travel arrangements ourselves day by day as we went along. Even on our previous sorties overseas, we were the ones in charge of trying to figure out the rail schedules or traffic signs for ourselves. The thought of following some martinet around based on HIS schedule ("All rrrright! Everybody into ze bus!") was out of the question. Even MORE out of the question would have been joining a tour group that caters to seniors, as this one did. Most of the friends we hang around with tend to be a couple of decades younger than us. I imagined that a senior tour group would resemble a bunch of shuffling zombies. I’ve never been more wrong. First of all, it’s kind of nice to be spoiled by tour directors who pick you up at the airport, see that your luggage goes to the right cabin on your boat, and watch over every aspect of your trip to see that nothing goes awry. Next, the seniors who take this kind of tour turned out to be the most young-at-heart, enthusiastic and fun loving bunch of people I’ve ever met. Most had been on many trips with this same tour company, and obviously knew how to enjoy it to the hilt. On all our previous trips, we concentrated on sightseeing. We were pretty successful at that, but we didn’t really get to know many of the local folks very well. This trip not only offered plenty of sightseeing, but the people we met were an unexpected and wonderful benefit. Our four tour directors were fountains of information and came from the area we visited (Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania). At every port, each of our busses had a local guide who not only pointed out the monuments and scenery but filled us in on the local culture, customs, politics, personalities, and history. There were college students who came on board to tell us about their lives after the transition from communism to democracy. We broke into small groups and had lunch with Croation families in their homes. We stopped at many places where we were entertained by local dancers, singers, and musicians. And when we weren’t being entertained and taught by these local people, we spent time with a boatload of fascinating Americans who have seen just about every part of the world. After this trip, meeting people is going to be even more important to us than seeing the sights. Looking back, I don’t really know why it took me so long to accept the idea of this new (for me) kind of vacation. I’ve always believed in the need for change. In fact, that was the reason for my retiring from a secure corporate job back when I was 55. It wasn’t a bad job, but I had been sitting there at the same level for ten years. After a good deal of thought, I came up with Adams’s Law of Corporate Motion: If you notice that you haven’t changed your position in the last ten years, you ought to consider the possibility that you’re dead. I didn’t like the implications of that, so I left the corporate world and struck out on my own. It’s been a lot more fun. Now, I think it’s time to formulate Adams’s Law of Vacations: If your last ten vacations have been very similar to each other, maybe what you’ve really been doing is just trudging off to work in a different way. ––Wayne Adams To read other Coprolite Columns, return to Newsletter Archives. You are welcome to forward this newsletter to anyone, as long as you send it in its entirety. To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://three.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coprolitenews.
Who are the Coprolites—a tribe, a secret society, a religious order? If you’re unfamiliar with this proud but little-understood group, visit http://www.coprolites.org for more information. Find out how you — or your friends and relatives "blessed with more than enough maturity" — can benefit. For professionally written and edited newsletters, brochures, speeches, scripts, or web copy, get in touch with WordMagic Communications. We have lots of powerful words in stock, with fresh supplies arriving daily. Need a speaker for your workshop, seminar, or meeting? Check out The Expert Speakers Group. .
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