Separate Vacations

My husband wants to go on a vacation-- someplace warm and foreign feeling, interesting, with sandy beaches and exotic drinks.  He keeps saying things like Florida, Bermuda, Barcelona, the islands.

I am unmotivated. I am not sure what we are vacating from. Our lives are not hard: neither one of us toils on an assembly line or in the cotton fields or in a coal mine or steel mill. I have an upscale consignment shop a mile from my house where I hang out and chat with people about antiques. Sometimes I do other things, like volunteer, but none of it is the least bit difficult or taxing. He spends a lot of time in the air, on the phone, on the computer and out to dinner, thinking hard and talking a lot, but it's not painful in any way, and he has enough energy leftover to pick things up and put them down at the gym almost every day.

We do not golf. I do not swim in the ocean; haven't since "Jaws." I do not sunbathe; haven't since I learned about skin cancer. I do not shop. What will we do every day? I realize that I need the opposite of a vacation--I need an agenda. He says how about India. I say it's much too far to fly, too many poor people once you arrive and flies on elephants everywhere. He suggests Mexico. I say too violent, I do not want a personal bodyguard and I hate Mexican food.

Have we reached that terrible moment, now in our 25th year of marriage, when the idea of separate vacations arises? I hope not, but it seems sad that he has to forgo his wanderlust because of my fear of flying. Of course, it's no sadder than me having to take a tranquilizer to get myself through security--take off your shoes, show them your tiny shampoo and tiny toothpaste, where's my boarding pass, what's that beeping, hold your arms up like this-- and into a tin tube for hours and hours, flirting with a blood clot in my leg, just so he can be somewhere else for a week. Plus, there's all that packing and unpacking and then packing again to come home and unpacking at home and laundry and arranging for the animals, etc.

After searching the Internet for hotels in warm places, all of which started to look too touristy and predictable and no fun at all, I asked if we couldn't just stay home and turn up the thermostat and make some of those pineapple drinks with little umbrellas in them, but he's watching the Super Bowl and has not responded.