Homing in on a rosy holiday
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
Well, I'm back from my exotic holidays. My stopping-all-stops tour of my backyard washing line and front drive was quite the treat. Just wait for the photos ...
Holiday highlights included me finding a park at the supermarket;
waking up in time to watch Oprah; visiting the bank when there was
no queue.
Okay, okay, so I didn't go anywhere. I holidayed at home. So stamp
me with “boring” and report me to Lonely Planet.
I was going to go to Saudi Arabia to visit my wayfaring Mum. But she
disappeared off to China for a conference. Thus, home sort of had
that rosy feel.
To the dubious, there are some real advantages to holidaying at
home, which you may not fully appreciate.
The beds are always comfortable. The only lumps are those you put in
there yourself.
The bathroom is guaranteed to give you a hot shower - and doesn't
require you naked, on hands and knees, pulling at knobs to get the
water going from bath nozzles to shower nozzles.
Home also comes with a fully stocked pantry. (Unless, of course,
you're at my place, in which case that's a barely stocked pantry
with a 1m-long shopping list stuck to it.)
Then there's the bar fridge. At Chateau La Home, you get the mother
of them all and you don't have to pay for the booze. Well, not each
morning, anyway.
Which brings me to those awkward morning wake-up calls. At home,
there's no panicked leaping out of beds and the ritual ramming of
dirty undies into suitcases by 10am lest some dear from housekeeping
catches a look at your trusty tiger-print daks.
Nope, home holiday-makers get to wallow as much as they like - and without a time limit.
Sure, the views at home may be less exotic. And the odds of bumping
into colleagues and ruining the illusion are frighteningly high.
But, when it comes to the tortured bank balance on holidays,
sometimes there really is no place like home.
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The
Advertiser, 23 DEC 1997