One of the sad truths of my life and librarianship profession is that I get a lot of vacation time as part of my benefits... but I don't earn enough to afford any decent vacations that I could go.
It's been like this every place of employment I've been - public AND academic library - where I have all this time I could take but no means to take them... I've capped out accrued vacation hours nearly every place I've worked, it got so bad when I was with Broward Libraries they insisted I take leave one year just so their HR computers wouldn't tank on my data. A following year the county offered a payout to cash of a set number of hours, which I took... and then added up all those vacation hours again because I still couldn't really afford a trip on the money I had in hand (which kind of went towards paying off part of my college loan debt I still had).
I did go on a week-long vacation last year - to go see Gettysburg on the anniversary of the battle, plus watching the 4th of July fireworks from the DC Mall - but that wiped me out financially even including the extra money my parents helped me with.
So here I am, kinda feeling like I need to use up leave 'cause I've capped out my vacation hours yet again... and yet I've got nowhere to go.
The smart thing would be to take little trips to places I can visit within reasonable driving distance - state parks, the beaches, museums - but going by myself to a lot of them is... well... sad.
Other thing I can do is get some more writing done, take the week off to complete any number of unfinished novels on hand. But that's feeling more like work than time off.
I might mix one or the other. We'll see.
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