The Staycation

The deadline for confirming our hotel break was nigh but the weather forecasted for Mayo was very unstable. T and I had to make a decision about whether we would take the room or not. We talked it through but found it hard to decide. Then I confessed that I had first made the hotel reservation because I thought she wanted to go away. T confessed that she had agreed to this trip because she thought I wanted to go away. We laughed. We were both trying to please the other when each of us would have preferred something else.

O Henry wrote a story that illustrates this type of misunderstanding. A young but very poor couple want to buy each other a special present for Xmas. The woman has long, beautiful hair but sells it to buy her husband a gold chain for the pocket watch that he has inherited from his grandfather. The man sells his grandfather’s watch to buy his wife a jewelled comb for her beautiful hair.

The good thing is that we confessed to each other before any disappointment could occur. Otherwise we might have ended up driving all the way to Mayo, watching the rain beating against the hotel room window and feeling some resentment against the other. So we cancelled the hotel reservation and began to plan days out and days at home.

T wanted time to sort out her clothes, books and other things, having been hard at work and dealing with me in and out of hospital since she moved in a year ago. I wanted time to do a series of good long bike rides before I went back into hospital and became incapacitated for months.

The next day the sun shone and we embarked on both of these plans. T pulled out all of her things that had been stored in boxes and began to sort through them. She put them in piles to keep and piles to give to the charity shop. Then she set about rearranging her books and other possessions. It was a grand summer spring clean.

I got out my maps and planned to redo a bike ride that I had last done before I got cancer. I drove to Ardee in Co Louth and rode through winding back roads to Kells in Co Meath. I had lunch in a second-hand bookshop with a cafe and then returned via a new set of back roads to Ardee. It was a grand day out in warm sunshine, the bike ride was 42 miles and took me the best part of five hours in total. The drive to Ardee down the motorway took less than an hour.

At the end of the day we both felt happy and satisfied. Our staycation had begun well.