In a way, I feel like Rip Van Winkle.

I flew over 4,000 miles across the Atlantic in order to feel far enough away from the relentless Florida sun, and I am quite certain my heart has not made the return trip. (If someone finds it unattended at Heathrow, please PM me, it comes in handy now and again.) Now that I am back “home” – that will almost always in quotes now – it is almost impossible to believe that I spent the last two weeks anywhere else, let alone places so far away. Places normally only accessible to me via a Google image search. My phone is now bogged down with Google-image-search-quality images that I know *I* took…thousands of them…and yet I find it increasingly hard to believe.

The world and all its problems had fallen away into nothingness, and for two weeks, I dreamt, lulled to sleep each night by the waves carrying our ship ever northward, to the Arctic Circle, and beyond.

What I took wasn’t a vacation. It was a very real escape, and I suppose what depresses me most, is not only am I back, but I came back willingly. Yes, yes I know, responsibilities, “that’s life” and all that rot. I am aware. Don’t be sad it’s over, be happy that it happened. I can’t help but wonder though, if perhaps my generation – and to a certain extent the ones before us, too – don’t take regular vacations,  not just because they fear being replaced, or somehow feel “guilty” requesting the time-off they’ve duly earned…but maybe, just maybe, they find it too hard, too depressing to deal with the post-vacation reality check.

Like I am now.

Life went on while I was away, and now, I must wake up. In the next few posts I will document my two weeks’ long dream, so I might relive it whenever my exposure to the “real world” gets to be too much, when I feel my sense of magic slipping away.

Join me, as I retrace my steps to where heaven awaits, just beyond the Arctic Circle.

– &i