The best thing about vacation is making plans for it. This is a truism, did you say? Of course, it is a truism. Occasionally we indulge in truisms, though our natural preference is for "isms" that are not true.
When we say "making plans," we mean plans only in the most general and romantic sense. Once you come down to details all the poetry is squeezed out of the thing. The business of writing to hotelkeepers and railway passenger-agents and other rich but dishonest people for information is a bore and a burden. So also is packing up.
Honestly, now, as one man to another, dear reader—or as one woman to a man, or whatever the circumstances may require—did you ever bring half the things you wanted, and did you ever use half the things you brought? Did you? No, of course not. No one ever does.
Personally, we have travelled light, and we have travelled heavy, and the result has always been the same. The year we took a trunk with raincoats and overcoats and various weights of underwear, and all the other encumbrances of civilization, the weather was fine and warm throughout, and all we really needed was a couple of shirts and some duck trousers. Even our toothbrush was useless, for we got practically nothing to eat.
The next time we decided to limit our impedimenta very strictly, and we carried our belongings in our pocket and a brown-paper parcel. That year we encountered every one of the fifty-odd varieties of weather and temperature, and two freight-cars couldn't have carried all the clothes we needed. The irony of things?—yes, also the tinnery and leadery, and any other base metal you can think of.
Therefore, we repeat, the practical details of getting ready for a vacation are a weariness and an abomination. But the general plans, the vague and glowing dreams—ah, the pictures of one's self poised like a god in the path of the breakers while the peaches on the beaches gaze longingly upon one, or again smiling carelessly while one steers canoes containing beautiful ladies down dangerous rapids, or still again singing amorous madrigals by moonlight while one drifts in the shadow of the pines! These visions are well worth the disillusion which follows.
Every young man—whether fifteen or fifty—has cherished these or similar dreams of the joys that await him in the days of vacation. And nearly every young man has had the same experience of going up to the same old summer hotel or boarding-house, where you sleep on a lumpy bed with a crazy quilt, battle with the flies for your food, and spend your evenings rowing a fat girl around a pond in a flat-bottomed boat.
Are we pessimistic?—well, perhaps we are pessimistic. But we have had some experience of summer resorts. We have sat on the porch with the married ladies in the evening, and listened to the merry crash as character after character fell in ruins to the ground. We have gone fishing for mythical bass and trout in famous fishing-grounds, where there hadn't been a fish within the memory of man—driven out by the mosquitoes, probably.
And the girls of summer resorts! We have walked with them, and read poetry to them, and eaten ice-cream cones with them, and discussed with them whether marriage is possible where true love is not. We have paddled them around on hot afternoons, and retrieved the balls which they drove into the river when we played tennis together. We have even proposed to—but we must not carry these confidences too far. Suffice it to state, that even those who accepted us let us see clearly that they regarded the eternal affection we swore to one another as being subject to recall with due notice. Sometimes they didn't even bother to give us the notice.
It was all vanity, vanity! But we cannot help remembering that some of the vanity was of a rather pleasant variety. There was that blonde up at—oh, never mind where!—a little thin, you know, but very soulful. She "adored" Browning, and claimed to understand "Sordello"—which was a lie, of course. And the little brunette, brown eyes and reddish hair—very "chick," eh, what?—with an abnormal appetite for brandied chocolates. Nice girls both. But time passes and one forgets. We don't even remember where they work!