There was a point on our bus ride to Bosnia when the nose of our vehicle turned inland, and the now-familiar glasslike swath of the Adriatic was lost to a landlocked series of craggy mountains. We weaved through tall, rocky hills dotted with shrubs; shocks of green grass covered the ground in between. Suddenly, as if from the ether, the Neretva River appeared snaking between the hills, a radiant blue-green streak that we followed across the border, through towns composed of buildings stung by bullet holes, and straight into the bus terminal at Mostar.

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Hello, my name is Maddie, and I haven’t been on a vacation in two. years.

It all started so innocently, with the wrapping-up of two delicious weeks in Hawaii in 2008, where I devoured tuna steaks and soaked in the ocean air like it was my job. But the next May brought with it a supposedly wonderful thing called “college graduation,” in which you leave the all-expenses-deferred student lifestyle only to stumble upon a rude awakening called “student loan payments.” Hello, full-time job. Hello, entire post-graduate summer spent running through the D.C. humidity in a pantsuit trying to secure said full-time job.

And now we are here, two years later. Recession be damned, I secured that full-time job, and the ten precious, precious vacation days it offered. I also secured a rather alarming amount of real life-induced, vacation-starved burnout along the way. So starting tomorrow, I’ll be using half of my vacation days (and my entire tax refund) to fly to Croatia, sun myself on its beaches, and gorge myself on its seafood risotto. I will stay in a cozy little apartment, and take day trips to Bosnia, offshore islands, and national parks. The whole time, I will also be cursing myself for not living in Europe, where giving someone only ten vacation days would probably be considered a criminal offense.

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