Learning on vacation
Perfect
vacation tip #8: Learn something, but stay whimsical
If you're following
my advice and going
to a new spot on each vacation, you probably won't know much about your
surroundings. That's a great opportunity to learn new
things, which for me usually means discoveries about the natural
world.
Mom found the
beautiful and informative Tideland
Treasure on our
trip, and that book helped us answer questions we'd had earlier in
our stay. For example, I felt like the waves were much lower
than they'd been in my childhood beach memories, and Tideland Treasure explained that we'd accidentally arrived at a neap tide,
when the force of the moon and earth counteract each other at the
quarter moons and cause lower highs and higher lows. If I
want those raging waves of memory, I need to plan our next trip
for spring tides at the new or full moon.
We gleaned other tidbits randomly from folks
we talked to. Mom and I had noticed several huge
jellyfish washed up on the beach, and our movie-star neighbor
mentioned he'd just seen a
piece in the New York Times about these moon jellies. Turning back to the book,
Mom discovered that moon jellyfish are edible, and that jellyfish
of various sorts are often eaten in Japan.
The trick with
learning on vacation is a lot like what I
discovered while beach combing. By looking with your own eyes for a
couple of days before hitting the books (or internet), you'll see
more and not get bogged down in the search for perfection.
(This admonition is only relevant for Type A people, of
course. Type B people probably stopped reading this
lunchtime series long ago because they were straining muscles from
all the eye-rolling.)
| This post is part of our Gratuitous Vacation Photos lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I've also been looking for those raging waves I remembered from childhood. Although changes in viewpoint mean I'm probably looking for waves twice as big as those I remember, and considerably more dangerous.
I found them this summer, but this was after a tropical storm had passed over, and it was clearly not safe to swim. Later I heard that someone had gone swimming that day, and washed up dead.
Anyway, one thing Ocracoke has that Pawleys lacks is that there's often a swimmable sandbar just offshore of Ocracoke, where the breakers are quite a bit bigger.
Something I've enjoyed doing while on holidays, is finding a book written about the area we're visiting. Not just a visitor's guide (like Lonely Planet) or factbook (like wildflowers of the region), but something that tells a story. It could be a biography of someone from the area, a travel diary of a visitor to the area, or even a novel set in the area.
For example, when we went to Borneo I took along a book about a guy who hiked through the jungle from one side of Borneo to the other. I could really picture what he was going through, what he was seeing and hearing, and how he would have felt. It really made the book come alive, and I'll never forget it. It also gave me a lot more insight into what I was seeing all around me during our holiday.
Being immersed in the sights and sounds of the book while reading it is an amazing experience!