Coming back from vacation is WORK.

If you have to work twice as hard in the 2 weeks after a 2 week vacation, is it really worth it to take a vacation?

That's the question I've been asking myself since I returned home from a grand road trip through FOUR National Parks in Canada. It was a fabulous adventure traveling with a 2-year-old and I am so happy to report that Little Miss Field Notes did not throw up in the car a single time. There were minimal amounts of fussing - remarkable given she had to sit in a car seat for many hours each day.

As for me, I love road trips. And this one we didn't even listen to that much music so there was hardly any singing in the car, and if anyone did, chances were that we'd hear a shout out request for Elmo. There are some great Sesame Street pop music guest appearances with the cheerful red monster man, but Adam Sandler, Katy Perry, Feist, and Will.I.Am get old! So we largely avoided that in the car and just watched for breathtaking scenery and charismatic megafauna like bears, woodland caribou, mountain goats, moose, etc. We saw them ALL! It was fabulous and the bear somehow was larger than I remember them from seeing them as a child.

During slow stretches, we chatted and played word games. Someone suggested what turned out to be a surprisingly hard one. Try thinking of words that end in "ous" alphabetically! Yeah, it sounded so easy at the time but for some reason all of my words sounded like a I ripped them out of the Sarah Palin dictionary. Hopefully I was just tired... but it did make me worry about how my dramatic shift in how I spend my time has probably taken a toll on my intellectual development.

I feel rusty. Really, really rusty. So, somehow I need to come up with a plan for how to stay academically engaged. At this point I suffer from both a motivational problem and a lack of time. Ugh.

I need a plan! (I'll come up with that right around the time I dig out from under about 2 weeks worth of work to catch up on).