The Great American Long Weekend

This is our season one, as we mockingly refer to it, in the great American series of long weekends. I am ruling out the last two years, since those were mostly spent hanging our heads over assignment deadlines, and baby chores. But not this year. This year we are wholeheartedly embracing this culture of taking off to some place over these elusive days called the long weekends. 

Now as we know it, since these coveted days are counted, one must act upon them as quickly as one can. What this does is, it results in the creation of a tribe of people, a potent force, who sit on top of things before any body else can  even veer their thoughts towards it. This tribe draws strength from 'meticulous planning', an art they have mastered over years of practice of spreading the net early, to catch the best deals and offers, before anyone else could grab them. In their pursuit of happiness, they spend days and weeks and even months, finding holiday deals, tracking down cheap air tickets, finding roads with maximum view, hotel/air bnb reservations, then diligently cramming all the places to see,  and then booking online-tickets to those places, and sneaking out early from office on Friday, and taking off, while keeping an eye on the work emails that never cease to flow, and so on and so forth. So this tribe, in a sense, are the propagators, the torch bearers of a tradition that has been tirelessly brining respite through their precision of planning, and the discipline of an early bird. 

Once the logistics of the anticipated happiness is sorted,  a testimony of the same is shared over social media platforms, where it appears as though, entire states are swapping places,  briefly moving over to the other coasts and returning, only when the party is over. East coast basks under the glorious west coast sun, the west coast, boasting over their own resources, stays put, and probably ventures to some near-by place, the deep South, pissed off with the relentless sun, hops over to the east coast for some cool respite. Whereas the midlanders remain perennially confused, with the great number of choices at offer with everything so near, and yet so far.  

The queues in public places trail endlessly over these days. Wait in restaurants does hazardous things to grumbling stomachs. Retail therapy means anything, but therapy, yet the sales are so hard to ignore. The highways get jammed with a sea of humanity getting stuck in their zen vehicles, while toddlers  wail cries of protests from their car seats. Music blasts off people's stereos declaring how happy they finally are, but only if they could reach their destination on time, and only if this happiness could last forever. The rest-areas get littered with drivers on an eternal auto-pilot haze, while passengers with bursting bladders relieve themselves of their agony. Cranky toddlers wreck havoc on mothers who are barley keeping it all together, and grandparents huddled in the back seats, are seriously considering returning to the comforts of their home. Yet, these memories are precious, and they add up, and give meaning to the otherwise ordinary lives we lead here. 

So this, to me, is the great American long weekend - an incentive, to keep the spirits high, an oases, to survive the challenging desert, and an excuse, to sneak in few extraordinary moments, in a series of mediocre events that make up our lives.