The Post-Vacation Blues

After a phenomenal vacation that challenged my senses and emotions, I returned to Kharkiv. And my heart sank.

It wasn’t Kharkiv’s fault. The disappointment started, on a small scale, when we left Ponta Delgada, and it grew slowly as we made our way back to Ukraine over several days. It became palpable when we got to Kyiv. Just being in the arrival area of Boryspil Airport, after going through airports in places like Lisbon and Paris, was a bit of a letdown.

We spent about four hours trying to “rest” on lightly padded bench seats in a corner of the airport terminal that was brightly lit, noisy and cold. But even this was better than waiting around in the train station; Kyiv’s train station is awful, especially in the wee hours of the morning. It’s a place to be avoided.

And we mostly managed to do just that. After a 45-minute bus trip to the station, our wait for the train was mercifully short, and we were soon onboard. Still, the train was taking us on the last leg of the trip back to Kharkiv, and it was a little sad.

I truly felt that I was back in my dour reality on the taxi ride from the Kharkiv train station to my apartment just after noon that Saturday. The usual sights and sounds that have long been part of my everyday life were a stark reminder that my “Vacation of a Lifetime” had become a memory, more like a dream than anything tangible.  

At one point the taxi turned up Kosmicheskaya Street, passed one of my favorite restaurants, Trattoria, and then turned north on Nauka Avenue (formerly Lenin Avenue). That’s when it reality hit me like a brick to the head. I was riding up a street that I see multiple times every week and had traversed hundreds of times in the past, perhaps even more: the same shops and buildings, the same traffic, the same marshrutkas, the same badly parked cars, the same people on the street. More than anything else, this shouted that the vacation was over.

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In a day and a half, I would be back in my office doing the same things I did before, dealing with the same corporate bureaucracy, the same pressures, the same worries, the same lonliness – the same life.

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I was back in Kharkiv – back to the same small apartment in the same gray building, and all the same little things about my life here that made the two-week escape so wonderful. In a day and a half, I would be back in my office doing the same things I did before, dealing with the same corporate bureaucracy, the same pressures, the same worries, the same lonliness – the same life.

Vacations are supposed to give us a break from the stresses of our work and life and let us enjoy a different experience for a while so that we can come back with renewed energy. But often, after an especially good vacation, we come back to a reality that just seems to swallow up whatever good impressions and energy we might have gained. And that’s how I felt.

It’s About the Speed of Time

Maybe the problem is time and the speed at which it passes. During those early days of a vacation, when you are wide-eyed with your first wonderful impressions, you know you still have more great days ahead of you, and it’s all good. In the back of your mind you know it’s going to pass quickly, but you try not to think about it and just enjoy the moment. It’s joyous, and you feel at peace.

As the vacation winds down, you start to realize how quickly the time has just whizzed by, and it can start to take away a little of the luster. You know that it’s going to be over soon, and you’ll have to go back. You start to think about how quickly the time has passed, and you feel like you’ve been robbed.

And once you have returned, you look back in amazement at just how fast that wonderful time transformed from a present-moment reality to a wistful memory, something more like a dream. You have photos and mementos of your trip, but it’s not part of your reality any longer. Yep, time is a thief, and you've been robbed!

The irony of time is that it seems there is never an end to our humdrum, workaday lives. But special times, like great vacation trips, are over in the blink of an eye. I suppose this is related to the accelerated passing of time I first wrote about two years ago in a New Year post called, Life at the Speed of Time.

Beat the Blues – Plan Another Vacation

Seven weeks have passed since I got back to Kharkiv, and I am still in awe of those two wonderful weeks in Portugal. I think less now about feeling let down, and I genuinely cherish the memories. When my head is in the right place, as it usually is, those memories are a bulwark to help keep my everyday life from bringing me down. It works.

Maybe it was a mental reaction to counter the blues, but almost as soon as I was back, I started thinking about another vacation in the future. To add some spice to it, I have been imagining how I might create something even better than the Portugal trip.

I had a pretty nice, although short, vacation to northern Italy in January 2015, and in August of that year I went on an all-inclusive vacation in Turkey that was much better than the Italy trip. The vacation in Portugal FAR outshone the Turkey trip in every way possible, so it’s certainly possible to put together a new adventure that could even surpass this latest trip.

I’ve started thinking about Hawaii (especially Maui), or maybe going in the other direction to visit the Seychelles, Thailand, Nepal or Sri Lanka. It’s crossed my mind that I might like to return to an old haunt like Japan or Peru, and I’d certainly enjoy seeing more of Argentina than I did during my one short working trip to Patagonia. And, of course, I still have unfinished business in Ireland.

But so much hinges on what the future holds, and at the moment I have no clue. After almost a decade in Ukraine, it does seem as though the time to leave may finally be approaching, in which case, exotic (and expensive) trips don’t seem to make much sense when I would need to save as much cash as possible to relocate.

But I truly don’t know yet what I want to do, so I am still free to dream of hiking in the lush green hills of Maui, basking on a beach in the Indian Ocean, revisiting the land of the rising sun, or exploring Buenos Aires. And dreams are always good to have. They keep the post-vacation blues at bay.

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