From 2004:
My friends all take vacations, and swear by them. I don’t, and after due consideration I’ve decided to blame this idiosyncrasy on my late father, who planned the family vacations of my youth on the mistaken assumption that the point of going somewhere is to do something. An anxious, restless man, he was never much good at doing nothing, whereas it seemed self-evident to me from childhood onward that the whole point of taking a vacation was to do whatever you wanted–including nothing–whenever you wanted….
Read the whole thing here.