What I Learned on My Summer Vacation

Fran Mainella

Director
National Park Service
Washington, DC

Truly great vacations have a lasting impact. They provide more than just fun, relaxation, and a much-needed escape. Summer vacations, at their best, capture your imagination.

Growing up, I always looked forward to the summertime, when my family would pack up the car and head west to explore the national parks. I'll never forget the first time that I visited the Grand Canyon. I was in sixth grade. I was amazed and inspired by the breathtaking magnitude of its great structures and the stories behind them. I remember thinking, This will always be here for me.

That experience, and many others like it on those summer trips, introduced me to what has become a lifelong passion for the outdoors. It expanded my sense of possibility. Now I return to some of these vacation spots as the director of the National Park Service. What's one of the biggest lessons that I learned from my vacations? Don't underestimate the value of a little summer adventure.

Fran Mainella (fran_mainella@nps.gov) , who has spent more than 35 years in parks-and-recreation management, was appointed by President George W. Bush to lead the National Park Service last year. She is the first woman to hold the position.

Paul Theroux

Novelist and travel writer
Hawaii and Cape Cod, Massachusetts

I'm not your typical vacationer. My life is divided between being in the bosom of my family and being totally alone in a place like western Uganda, on a bus, on a bad road. I travel a lot. But I can't say that I've ever taken a vacation in the classical sense, because I've never felt a need to get away from it all. My idea of a vacation isn't an escape from reality, such as relaxing poolside at a fancy resort hotel, but rather the pursuit of the familiar. It's about reconnecting.

Summertime means going back to where I came from. As a child, I spent my summers on Cape Cod and now return every year for four months, from June to September. While I'm there, I grow tomatoes, sail, write every day, swim every afternoon, make spaghetti sauce with my tomatoes, cut the grass, and whip the house into shape.

For many people, taking a vacation and traveling are one and the same. But there's an important distinction between a typical vacation and travel. On a vacation, you only get to see the surfaces, whereas traveling allows you to see beneath the surfaces. Traveling is about self-discovery: It's personal, literary, and mystical. It's about the challenge of a self-led adventure in an unfamiliar landscape. It's sometimes uncomfortable and often upsetting. But it's worth it. If you make a meal of your adventure, your spirit is revived. You walk away from the experience with an insight into yourself, or into the world. For a couple of weeks of vacation, though, that's a pretty tall order.

Paul Theroux is currently working on a book about a trip that he took last year from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa. His most recent book is the novel Hotel Honolulu.