Pictures from our vacation

Once you’re back from vacation, you experience what is known as a post vacation hangover – something similar to a post party hangover – party’s over and clean up begins!! From a tropical paradise we landed in good old Portland where we received a typical northwestern welcome – RAIN!!  We came back to a cold apartment with a dusty carpet and an empty refrigerator and not to forget loads and loads of laundry. In India, you may have the luxury of dumping it on your maid or your house help but we are simply not that lucky!! But no matter where you live, one thing you or your spouse cannot dump on anyone else is uploading photos or videos!! Between you and your spouse, I guess the responsibility is on the one with a more eager set of family or friends! In my case, it squarely falls on my shoulders to  upload and share the photos with friends and family! In the matter of sharing photos, most people can be grouped into three categories. Some people have cameras with massive black holes i.e. pictures taken in them never see the light of the day! Some people just can’t relax until they’ve uploaded all the pictures, sequenced and organized them, captioned them and shared them on every social networking site!! Some others upload all their pictures but forget to rotate them or leave you to figure out the captions or decide which ones are the best!! :-) Where do you belong? 

Anyway, today I read a book titled “Pictures from our vacation” by Lynne Rae Perkins. Awarded the Newberry medal, this book is best suited for slightly older kids who are able to relate to the bitter-sweet memories of a family vacation. Narrated in first person, this story is from a kid’s perspective of a family vacation planned by her parents. On a vacation to the family farm, a young girl and boy are given a Polaroid camera to capture the vacation’s best moments and keep them as souvenirs. The long journey by road proves to be boring with nothing to do except look out of the window. But thanks to their cameras, they keep themselves busy by taking pictures of the hills, trucks, and signposts that they come across on the way. On reaching their destination, their father gets nostalgic about the farm house and the fun moments he spent there as a child, but all they could see was the old and dusty furniture. To cheer them up, he takes them to play badminton outside. Before they could straighten the old and bent rackets, it begins to rain and the rain doesn’t stop. So in many ways, the vacation at the old farm house does not go as expected but is marred by bad weather, loss of way, and doing uninteresting things like attending memorial service with strangers supposed to be distant relatives. When it’s time for them to leave, they look at their pictures and wonder if the pictures remind them of their vacation at all as none of them are of people but only pictures of hills, passing trucks, signposts and bent rackets, etc. But then the young girl admits that it is hard to take a picture of a story someone tells, or the feeling of getting wet in rain or sleeping in a house full of relatives you’ve met for the first time . Those are the pictures are to be stored in the camera of the mind!! So while the pictures may simply reveal one of the best beaches, or spectacular waterfalls, or breathtaking overlooks, or one of the most  beautiful sunsets ever witnessed, they also remind you of the tedious drives, exhausting hikes and  petty arguments you’ve had to make those pictures happen:-)