I also miss pre-pandemic February vacations. My family (except for my dad, who had work and couldn’t get out of it) would go down and spend the week with my grandparents and their friends on a small island about an hour from Tampa, FL. The warm sunny days, the ocean in every direction, palm trees (which are actually a type of grass) everywhere, Bert the Great Blue Heron (he likes popcorn and was relatively friendly with humans for a wild bird), the aquarium with an entire preserved giant squid and a place where you could touch sharks, all the strange places where we’d get meals, my favorite donut shop I’ve ever been to, all of the “joy” signs that my grandparent’s friends have scattered around the house (I think we counted 14 on the second floor last time), the humidity, and the rain that would pour down every afternoon for like fifteen minutes, the sheer amount of ice cream we always ended up with, swimming, poking fun at our friend because sixty-degree water is not cold Jem, the wonderful openness of everything being either glass or partially outdoors or both, real key-lime pie, and my personal enjoyment of flying on planes and seeing other airports, because not one is like another (The Tampa one has full-out aquariums, Baltimore has a whole hallway of moving sidewalks, Boston has lights over their bathroom stalls to tell you which is open and has poles that hold up the glass ceiling like trees, Manchester has a stone bench that’s at least thirty feet across, Providence has a hallway that’s covered in bubbly art to look like a portal).
On top of this, when I actually think about it, my mother gets seasonal depression, and I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if I did too, and the constant sunlight and lots of outdoor activity were probably really good for alleviating it. On top of this, I enjoy the change of pace that vacations bring, as well as the changes in my creativity that different locations will bring me, so vacations are really fun all around for me.