As we roll through July, and the office empties out with coworkers gone fishin’, I’ve been forced to come to terms with a certain unfortunate fact: I’m not going on vacation this year.

Since I’m only three months into work with my new employer, I haven’t been gifted with any days off yet (I’ll have to wait for the six- and twelve-month marks till that happens—and what glorious days those will be!). It could be a whole lot worse, since I’ll end up with eighteen days of paid leave once the year is through—um, yes please? But as Tom Petty so eloquently put it: “The waiting is the hardest part.”

Weekend trips are out, too, as I recently passed my beloved old Bridget Honda on to a new owner. Again, no complaints: I’m elated that $4.50/gallon gasoline, car insurance premiums, and repair bills aren’t draining my bank account any longer. It means, however, that I won’t be leaving Chicagoland for a very long time, as enchanting a land as it may be.

When you have no time, no transportation, and no resources, you dream. So allow me to fantasize a bit about future vacation days, will you?

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Do you remember the end of the first season of Mad Men, when Don’s pitching an idea to the bigwigs at Kodak? He’s standing up by their Carousel slide projector, flipping through visions of his memories. “This is not a spaceship, it’s a time machine,” he said. “It goes backwards and forwards, and it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

I’ve felt like I was standing up beside a slide projector these past few weeks, clicking through memories. And I couldn’t stop thinking of Don’s words, how photos take us “to a place where we ache to go again.” Albums full of images aren’t just art or trophies; they’re the narrators of our life stories, aren’t they? I came back from Croatia with a fully-loaded digital camera, but that memory card was filled with nostalgia as much as data. I’ve taken my sweet time to recount my single week in the Balkans, but that act has forced me to nurture my sense of adventure. It’s reminded me that there’s something bigger than my current existence in the faceless, traffic-ridden suburbs of Washington: there’s magic and danger and exhilaration out there. You just have to decide to go after it.

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Summer is undeniably gone, having been swept away from Virginia over the course of a single rain-drenched week. One day, commuters at the nearby Metro suddenly appeared wrapped in coats, like someone had flicked on a light switch; I stride into work now with knit tights tucked into tall leather boots. For the first time in six months, my morning routine includes hot oatmeal. And on Saturday, a dear friend brought over pumpkin cupcakes to share. Pumpkin! Now that’s a harbinger of autumn if I’ve ever tasted one. The next afternoon, we warmed our first pot of spiced cider on the stove, throwing the heady scents of orange zest, cinnamon, and cloves into the air. (Air, by the way, which is no longer air-conditioned; I finally switched the thermostat to “heat,” and it kicked into gear with the faint smell of burning. It’s a little out of practice, I guess.)

As much as these wonderful developments should encourage me to embrace the here and now, I finally feel able to let in the first twinges of summer nostalgia. To be honest, I like the idea of summer more than the sweaty reality of it (although, granted, I seriously miss the incredible produce). So it’s now—when my alarm clock begins blaring in the pitch-black—that the memory of Hvar‘s beaches brings out an especially daydreamy quality in me, even as others are staring out their windows, waiting for the leaves to change.

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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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It started out as one of the more unassuming days of the trip: awakening to a cloud cover over the city and the steady pattering of raindrops; falling into a jetlagged, three-hour nap immediately after filling our bellies with breakfast pastries. And yet the day of our jaunt to the beaches at Brela stays with me, two and a half weeks later. It was the dark horse of Croatian excursions.

You can reach Brela via the local bus to Makarska, a small city an hour and a half south of Split. That afternoon, our bus wound its way tightly around jagged mountains that jutted into the sea, and holdover raindrops from that morning’s storm streaked intermittently across the Plexiglass window like furtive tears. The driver let us off on the side of the road, high above the water, and we walked down asphalt switchbacks until we found the pebbly beach we’d heard so much about.

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From the outset, our hope for Split was that it would be a Croatian home away from home. Home, that is, in the sense that recalls a place of comfort and refuge—and we certainly got our wish. But I know too well that home is a shade of gray, a place that’s wearing new clothes every time you leave or come back to it. So it was with Split, a charming, magical little city that comforted and surprised us over the seven days we lived there.

On our bus ride from the airport into town, we gazed out the windows with bleary eyes, predisposed to feel who-knows-what about the place. Our trans-Atlantic flight had been like commuting via day spa, with the red-lipsticked flight attendants providing hot towels and hot meals with a smile, and refilling our water and wine glasses before we’d even reached the bottom. Yes, we were starting to feel optimistic about Europe. But we hadn’t seen more than blurry Wikipedia pictures of Split itself—chosen more for geographic convenience within the country than for anything else—and after so much traveling, we were verging on cranky. At first glance, our chosen destination seemed to offer a heavy dose of Eastern Europe: imposing Soviet-style high-rises dotted the outskirts of town (which Ted brightly deemed “less depressing” than their Russian cousins). But breaking through a cluster of cinder-block apartments, the Adriatic suddenly appeared like an oasis, shimmering azure below a coastline backed by craggy mountains. There was Italy, too, in these streets—lots to be had, we’d soon find, in the Roman architecture of Split’s old town, on the hairline curves of the coastal roads, and every night on our dinner plates.

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Yesterday, I woke up in America, but I still felt blissfully empty. This was a lingering lightness, a holdover from vacation that I longed to hold onto: a clarity of mind, and a slackness of shoulder muscles free of worry. It’s a shame that to desperately grasp at keeping such a sense of calm is only to push it further away, because if I could make this clearheadedness stay with me—just for awhile—I’d use all the brute force I could muster.

Most of my time abroad was spent exploring and consuming gelato, but I’ll save the details of those particular kinds of loveliness for later. Right now, I want to tell you about something more unassuming, borne from a threateningly cloudy afternoon in Croatia. I spent part of that afternoon gazing at the Adriatic from marble steps on Split’s seafront promenade; it was a moment midway through the trip in which I stopped to take a breath. In that moment, I found that I didn’t miss my laptop, my wardrobe, my apartment, or any other possessions I’d come to rely on in America. I sat there with Ted as a collective island in this sea of new sights and citizens, and somehow I still felt completely at home—like a baby nestled in a security blanket. Only this was a blanket of new and different stripes, one that I hadn’t realized could provide such comfort to me.

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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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It seems only appropriate to end these tales of Blueberry Week in Maine. It’s full-on August now, and some of my best Augusts were spent there as a teenager, in a little house on Lake Sebago. And it’s no surprise that blueberries—like those other Maine delicacies, lobster and maple syrup—figure prominently into my favorite recollections of those trips. After all, we always stayed with dear family friends (Dave and Sue) in a television-free cabin, sans computers, in a place where cell phone service was spotty at best. It was the simple pleasures that became the fabric of our days.

Instead of our electronic devices, the greatest source of entertainment was each other. Sue loved reading in the plastic lawn chair propped up by the water, on the cabin’s tiny inlet that served as a beach. She also liked to take morning walks, and made us rooibos tea when the sun dipped low—a fixation borne from a trip to South Africa. Dave gathered us around the coffee table for card games, and he and my dad shared a fondness for almanac trivia sessions. (Seriously, I can’t tell you how many times I was quizzed about the five longest suspension bridges in the United States.) They were both amateur astronomers, too, and no trip was complete before we’d gathered once on the dock after dinner, starstruck under the brilliant rural sky, to piece together constellations.

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In a year that’s been rife with firsts, planning my first non-family vacation is one of the most exciting milestones. Graduating from college? Landing a full-time job? Living off my own paychecks? Okay, they’re all admittedly points of pride. But planning a trip myself trumps everything, because it’s all being done in the spirit of adventure, escape, and trying new things. And there are no rules: I can choose my own destination (anywhere in the world!), lodging (B&B? hostel? apartment?), and itinerary.

So I’ve taken special pride in plotting out the steps of this little jaunt to Croatia, and here’s a new development in the process: just this week, my boyfriend and I found (and booked) a perfect home base in Split. Take a look, why don’t you?

All photos courtesy of Croatian Villas.

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