Last updated on July 17, 2011
The New Yorker unearthed this David Sedaris short story from its archives:
“At some point in the mid- to late nineteen-sixties, North Carolina began referring to itself as ‘Variety Vacationland.’ The words were stamped onto license plates, and a series of television commercials reminded us that, unlike certain of our neighbors, we had both the beach and the mountains. There were those who bounced back and forth between one and the other, but most people tended to choose a landscape and stick to it. We ourselves were Beach People, Emerald Isle People, but that was mainly my mother’s doing. I don’t think our father would have cared whether he took a vacation or not. Being away from home left him anxious and crabby, but our mother loved the ocean.”
As a side note, it is scary to think that if we had kids, they would probably say the same about their parents.