Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals Read Online Free

chair, cross her legs, and answer, “They’re abroad.” And everyone would be quite impressed when she added, “Doing nothing.”
    Even though we often lived in geographically distant places, the six members of my immediate family had always gotten together at Christmas. According to my parents, there was simply no plausible excuse for not showing up, not “Mom, I’m sick” or “Dad, I have to work” or even “Sorry, but you guys live twenty-four hundred miles away in a Central American country.”
    This year, we were going to be spending our first holiday season in Honduras. To avoid any potential reticence on the part of her daughters, my mother sent a letter explaining that she and my dad were springing for the airplane tickets—not that her children really needed any convincing when it came to hopping aboard an airplane. I was in desperate need of a trip abroad—it would bring some much needed excitement to my dull existence of employee newsletter writing, and for several weeks prior to departing, the high point of my workday was witnessing the puzzled look on the aeronautical engineers’ faces after they innocently inquired into my plans for the holidays.
    Did I plan to go home?
    â€œSort of.”
    Where was home?
    â€œThis year it’s Tegucigalpa.”
    Tegucigalpa?
    â€œYes, you know, the capital of Honduras.”
    They weren’t sure if I was kidding, but since the exchange had already used up several minutes of valuable rocket-making time, they would smile uncertainly and quickly excuse themselves to go back to the safety of their secret labs and soundproof rooms. Alone in my office, I would chuckle happily at the private joke they had not understood, reassured in the fact that I was not one of them after all.
    A week before Christmas, landing at the airport in the capital of Honduras, I was struck by a twinge of nostalgia. The plane came careening down, barely avoiding the mountains beneath us, and made a bumpy landing on a runway much too short, which was compensated for by the pilot who frantically slammed down on the brakes and swerved to the left, skillfully avoiding the airport in front of us. Ah, Latin America. It hadn’t changed a bit in the past twenty years.
    One of my father’s mining engineering jobs had taken us to Peru when I was four years old, and as a kid for a while I really had believed I was a Latina. I switched between English and Spanish without effort, wandered about in an alpaca poncho, and hung out with our maid, Ana, who taught me words in Quechua and took me up into the Andes where we ate beef-heart shish kabob (called
anticuchos)
surrounded by a herd of llamas.
    Needless to say, I returned to the States a pretty weird kid. I was the only third-grader in my class who had never tasted a Big Mac, had no idea who this Grover guy was (was it true that he was blue?), and was completely baffled by the machine that you put a quarter into (which coin was the quarter?) and got a soda can out of. In Peru, soda did not come from machines, and it definitely didn’t come in a can.
    Eventually, my images of Peru faded to that dreamlike state reserved for childhood memories. I learned how to play Atari and I realized that American girls got a lot more mileage begging for ponies instead of pet llamas. But there was always a part of me that longed to return, to see that mysterious country that had given me the ability to pronounce strange-sounding words in an accent that always made my friends in Tennessee laugh, the place where my daily happiness had been as certain as the fact that summer arrived each December.
    I walked down the stairs that they had rolled out to the plane, feeling strangely like a kid again. The scent of dust in the air triggered images of my childhood and all around me were the familiar sounds of a language I could nearly make out but not quite understand. It was eerie—I could imitate the words I