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Highlands Today

Working Vacation Always Ends Up Being Work

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By Raleigh Whiteman | Highlands Today

Published: July 17, 2008

Working Vacation Always Ends Up Being Work

I need to apologize to you and my editor for not submitting my column last week as I had planned, but the best made plans of man oft go awry, and my plans certainly did not happen as I had thought they would.

Many of you may not know it, but I am the editor and publisher of a 20-page quarterly Elks newspaper and I was covering the Elks National Convention held in Anaheim, Calif., to report on it in the next edition, which is due to be printed next week.

Last week's column for this paper was supposed to be about my experiences with the airlines and my airline flight to our country's west coast. The PW and I were flying to Las Vegas, then renting a car to drive to Anaheim and I had planned to use my new laptop to compose and send the column from our hotel room after we arrived.

We wanted the car so we could return to Vegas for a short four-day stay after the convention.

Wondrous Country

I really enjoy flying and seeing our country from coast to coast from almost seven miles above it. The geology and mystery of the landscape is wondrous and I always get a crick in my neck straining my 6 foot, 2 inches to stoop down and look out the aircraft's window for the four-plus hour trip. I cannot come close in describing the beauty and the thoughts I had as viewing the earth from that high altitude.

Then driving across the 260 miles of mostly desert from Las Vegas to Anaheim on what I had envisioned to be a sparsely traveled highway was another visual wonderment. Instead of there being few automobiles making that trip, there was an almost continuous flow of vehicles both ways traveling in 115 degrees of heat.

There were times that we could see maybe 50 or more miles ahead of desert and mountains we were going to traverse and the almost total lack of vegetation as we know it here in Florida, only scattered sagebrush and an occasional cactus. I had forgotten how hot 115-degree temperature was when I had been stationed in Tucson, Ariz., in the early 1950s. I was amazed at how many people actually live out there making a living where we had stopped about halfway across. There is a whole city of thousands of people living in Barstow, Calif., and thinking nothing of how hot it is.

Busy, Busy, Busy

It took us more than four hours to get to Anaheim and checking into the hotel, it was very late and I lost complete interest in doing so that evening and would wait until I had the column finished before hooking up to the Internet. To make a long story short, I never got the chance to put together a column what with going to the convention every day and then socializing with the more than 7,000 Elks out there and doing a bit of sightseeing I decided I would wait until we returned to Las Vegas.

Then, after returning to Las Vegas and finding out it would cost $13.95 a day plus tax to connect to the Internet, and having lost most of my allotted funds on the one armed bandits I lost interest in contributing more to the hotel and never got my column even started.

Raleigh Whiteman, of Lake Placid, is a contributing writer to Highlands Today. You can reach him on the Internet at rwwhiteman@comcast.net

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