We took a bit of time off last summer and went to UK. My wife and I love cricket and castles and UK has a lot of both of those! So, every time we get an opportunity to go somewhere, we always think of going to England. For those of you who don’t know a whole lot about cricket, it should suffice to know that it is perhaps one of the most relaxing sport there is and the fact that a version of it is played over 5 days with tea, lunch and drinks breaks during the course of each of those days perhaps play a small role in making it that peaceful 🙂

I’ve always loved cricket and despite living half my life in the United States, I am yet to develop an interest in watching any other sport and I blame it on my deep rooted love for cricket. We went ground hopping from Lords to Leeds to Edgbaston, all the way up to the Scottish Cricket Club in Edinburgh. The longer form of the game is broken down into 3 sessions per day with each of them running for about 2 hours. We would walk into the grounds and catch a couple of sessions. Given that a number of these games were county games, there weren’t a lot of people in the stadiums so that added to the peace factor as well. And if memory serves right, we were perhaps the only 3 in some of the cricket grounds other than the players! That meant we would actually end up meeting the Scottish Cricket Captain who would almost actually walk up to us to introduce himself. Can you believe it?! He was not only a real nice guy but a very good batsman as well.

When we weren’t watching cricket, we were doing one of 2 things. Eating, it was very easy to find vegetarian food in UK, or visiting one of the many castles. Given that we immensely enjoy walking, a castle is one of the perfect spots to be at. They provide plenty of room for walking or climbing. And despite their histories that most likely has a lot of violence attached to it, they are absolutely peaceful to visit today. We found peace in the cricket ground, more peace walking the streets of Scotland and even more peace touring the castles.

I fell in love with Scotland so much that I started googling “Ruby, JavaScript, Java openings”. And I started imagining what writing code would be like sitting in front of, say, the Inveraray Castle. I’ve read that artists, musicians & authors travel to exotic locations to help inspire them. Agreed, I’ve no such talents but I can’t see why it might hurt to actually try and do whatever it is that you do best while enjoying the serenity of that exotic location. Well, I’ve made up my mind that one day I want to surely give that a try. Let’s see if I can produce better quality code and architecture if I have the blessing to be able to build a new ReactJS app somewhere near the Swiss Alps or in a cricket ground in UK or Australia!

In any case, we did the cricket and castle hopping, day in and day out, for 10 days and then, it was time. Time to return to reality and get back to the demands of life in general. While a vacation doesn’t last forever, and we all wish it did, it still begs the question if we are doing enough to try and make our day to day lives vacation enough so we don’t actually have to eagerly look forward to those meager 2 or 3 weeks every year. It is a given that some of us are blessed a bit more than a few others, and a whole lot more than some others. And while it is entirely true that someone else would happily trade your life for theirs as your life stands right now at this very moment, it is also possibly true that you are possibly spending your life chasing something else or catching up with someone else who you look up to. A vacation is meant to give us a break from all of that, and sometimes, it truly does.