A Life on Vacation

By Kait Carson

I was casting around for a last-minute blog topic this morning so I could finalize my Newsletter this afternoon and coming up empty. What a surprise, I thought. My brain is on vacation. That’s when the light bulb lit and pulsed. Vacations. Past. Present. Future. How perfect.

My Dad worked for the Otis Elevator Company. Like most 1950s kids, I’m clueless about how much annual vacation my father received, but I knew that somewhere in the two-week period that surrounded my July birthday, we’d be packing the car for a road trip.

Road trips were the quintessential defining events of the era. We drove from our New Jersey home to Miami, Cuba (the auto ferry assisted with the watery parts), Washington D.C., Northern Virginia, Upstate New York, Montreal, the 10,000 Islands, Boston, Philadelphia, and of course, the Jersey Shore (pronounced goin’ dinna shore). Many of these trips were pre-interstate highway systems. Traveling back roads was a joy for a kid, and Dad turned off at any place the AAA TripTik suggested a historical or scientific location. Sometimes he even found them! I didn’t appreciate the magic of those trips until I became an adult and air travel replaced the open road.

By the time my generation was self-supporting, recessions, sky-rocketing oil prices, and economic downturns plagued the world. So, let me begin by saying unless you consider retirement a vacation, I may hold the record for taking a grand total of one during my working life. Quite the accomplishment when you consider my work life began in 1974. But don’t hang out the hankies for me. My lack of vacations didn’t equal a lack of travel. Between 1980 and 1989, I had a part-time job running a friend’s company in Europe and the Caribbean. Every weekend and most holidays found me in St. Thomas, Sint Maarten, Saba, Stasia, Milan, Florence, Paris, and London. Cue the hankies. It was exhausting.

During the 1990s, I became a rabid scuba diver and spent most weekends in the Florida Keys. This hobby led to my only real vacation. A live-aboard dive trip to Belize in 2004. Maine beckoned soon after, followed by a return to Florida. The pandemic brought me full-circle with a return to Maine. In many ways, life turned into a vacation. Talk about good fortune.

These days, I’m retired, living in Maine and grateful for the journals I kept of my travels. When you’re a writer, no experience goes unrewarded, or unplundered. I’m in the vicarious vacation stage of my life. Giving the odd nuggets of past events to my characters and watching them grow into scenes and plots.

Writers: Do you plunder your past in the service of your art? Readers: Do you enjoy ripped from real-life events in fiction?

Kait Carson writes the Hayden Kent Mysteries, set in the Fabulous Florida Keys, and is at work on a new mystery series set in her adopted state of Maine. Her short fiction has been nationally published in the True Confessions magazines and in Woman’s World. Kait’s short story, “Gutted, Filleted, and Fried”, appeared in the Silver Falchion Award-nominated Guppy Anthology Hook, Line, and Sinker. Her nonfiction essay was included in the Agatha Award-winning book Writing the Cozy Mystery. She is a former President of the Guppy Chapter of Sisters in Crime, and a current member of Sisters in Crime and Guppies.