We all get a little whimsical as we get older. Most of us sooner rather than later. You can see this particularly well on vacation, when we finally have time for our personal quirks. There are 35-year-olds who then fly halfway around the world to maneuver small balls into holes that are just as small or to look for them in the undergrowth, cursing. And there are 40-year-olds who, without complaining, swap a shoe box on wheels for their spacious terraced house for weeks and still praise it as a great freedom.
Do not worry. I would never make fun of golfers or RV enthusiasts. Because my holiday hobby is no less bizarre: My husband and I like to flatten our noses in the shop window of the local real estate agent or the district savings bank. We immediately begin to calculate (he) and set things up (me). A bright sofa under the dormer window in the thatched cottage, a 1960s kitchen for the loft apartment in an old granary, blue chairs for the cottage on the heath. Yes, I admit it: I dream of my own holiday home. Not rented, bought. Including land register entry.
That was not always so. Going to the same vacation spot twice – or even every weekend? Ten years ago I was just as suspicious of people who did this as monogamous couples were to a 1968 commune from Kreuzberg. What I was least interested in when traveling was accommodation. The main thing is a roof, a door and cheap. You only saw the room in the dark anyway, after returning from the last nightcap. Of course, I could blame my slightly nostalgic dream of my own dacha on the children who have come into my life in the meantime. Even die-hard city dwellers become comfortably sentimental when the offspring are looking for fox tracks in the forest or harvesting tomatoes in the cottage garden. I don’t even get a Ficus benjamina over the winter and I can’t tell fox tracks from rabbit tracks. But our childless friends are no different. Susanne and Hartmut have turned a tool shed including an orchard in Ostholstein into a holiday bungalow, and even bohemian Birgit now has her own weekend Worpswede: she shares a draughty former harvest hut in the Old Country with her artist clique.
What brings us against all reason to such purchases? Even though we know very well that our holiday pay will go to repair thatched roofs in the future? And that by the third rainy day in July at the latest, we would have liked nothing more than a last-minute week in the south, as long as it was sunny? I think it’s about that one ideal place with a huge imaginary warning sign for everyday life: “Do not enter!” A holiday home is a shelter for happiness, where you would never take your tax return with you. A piece by Bullerbü, where the carefree childhood happiness from the first of six weeks of summer vacation is supposed to set in again. Your own hut or a weekend apartment, that means: arriving after years of island, job and relationship hopping. And be it only in a 30 square meter attic room behind the dyke.
By the way:
we are still looking, preferably in the direction of Dithmarschen-Eiderstedt. If you know anything: please send confidential information to Tolfioow in a discreet envelope. Not that anyone else is faster.
