A reading vacation

My wife (Lin­da) and I are going to do some­thing we have only talked about for years: A vacation. 

Mind, we live in a log house high (9,000 feet up) in the Col­orado Rocky Moun­tains, a place where many peo­ple come to have their vaca­tions.  Med­i­cine Bow Nation­al For­est, The Zirkel Wilder­ness, and Steam­boat Springs State Park are part of our world. I need only walk a hun­dred yards and I’m deep into Routt Nation­al For­est.  On a clear day I can look down into the val­ley and there, some six­ty miles away, is Flat Tops Nation­al For­est.  Hahns Peak (10,843 feet high) dom­i­nates our back-yard view. On the oth­er side is Iron Moun­tain. Post Office (no local deliv­ery) is twelve miles away. The near­est super-mar­ket is thir­ty miles away. We’ve already had two inch­es of snow. Quite a change for a NYC boy. 

Yes­ter­day, when I woke up and looked out the win­dow, I saw a buck with a many-point­ed rack of horns. With him was a doe, and two spot­ted fawns.  The per­fect for­est fam­i­ly, a few feet from my front door. Bam­bi, in real life. 

Mid-sum­mer, huge, lum­ber­ing RVs come along our nar­row roads, many with expres­sive names embla­zoned on them, names like “Soli­tude,” or “Escape,” or once, even “Rough­ing It.” 

The last vaca­tion we took —two years ago–was to Venice, Italy.  Poor me, I had to do research for a book I am still writing. 

What’s spe­cial about the vaca­tion we are about to take? 

It’s what we call a “read­ing vacation.” 

The idea is sim­ple: we have booked into a resort that rents out small (Covid-clean) cab­ins. We will spend four days read­ing. No work allowed. Food deliv­ered to our door. 

We are both big read­ers so that there has been much dis­cus­sion about what to read.  We have even ordered spe­cial books. Lin­da has a copy of Ele­na Ferrante’s new nov­el, The Lying Life of Adults as well as Helen Macdonald’s col­lec­tion of essays, Ves­per Flights.  I have a copy of John Le Carre’s lat­est, Agent Run­ning in the Field and Ali and Nino, a nov­el first pub­lished in 1937 writ­ten by an unknown writer. (High­ly rec­om­mend­ed by my brother). 

Weath­er depend­ing, we’ll hike, ride bikes, but read­ing is what this break is all about. We are both excit­ed by it.  We will be liv­ing what our bumper stick­er proclaims: 

BETTER READ THAN DEAD 

(You have to be a cer­tain age to get the joke.)