How was your vacation? Great, amazing, special, magical? Or perhaps it was disappointing, costly, boring and exhausting.   The amount of money one spends on a vacation virtually guarantees that you will not say it was a negative and colossal waste of time.  We work all year long to afford this little trip so it must be described as glorious, marvelous and wonderful.

My graduate school professor Dr.  Fred Levine used Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance to explain this curious state.  The theory states that discomfort is felt when holding two conflicting beliefs, attitudes or values. People seek consistency of thought, not conflict.  So when someone plans on a vacation, goes on a vacation and pays for the vacation, you better believe that they will tell you it was a stupendous experience, even if it was not.

So let me honestly try to describe my Switzerland vacation. I started out with the usual naïve excitement  and hope of Clark Griswold in the comedy film series “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” but my blissful naiveté came to a crashing halt when I was informed at the airport that the flight was canceled and that I would be staying overnight in one of those hellish hotel airports near JFK.

The overnight stay began with an unusual twist as I entered my hotel room to be encountered by a family of three who were already occupying the room. I felt it would be inappropriate to stay with them, given the fact that I did not know their names, so I walked back to the elevator in an effort to go back to the front desk and asked for a different room.

I entered the elevator to find that I would be sharing the elevator ride down with a woman who was essentially half naked. What I meant by that is she had on a top and bottom but her top was unbuttoned.  I found this both diverting and mildly exciting but also eerie, like I was now in the film “The Shining” with that frightening hotel in the mountains.    I escaped the hotel elevator without incident and returned to the front desk where upon I was given another room.

Alas, my adventure was not over yet for as I re-entered the elevator I now found myself in the presence of another lady. We remained silent half way up to my floor and then she suddenly blurted out that she was sorry she had been so quiet on the way up and that her mind was actually racing a mile a minute.  I was smart enough not to ask what kind of thoughts she was having at the time.  The elevator did have the smell of marijuana, so I assumed that this lovely young lady was “stacked up over Kennedy” to use a phrase from the film  “Putney Swope.”

The rest of the evening was thankfully uneventful and the next day I was finally on my way to Switzerland and the Alps. You can see how educational vacations can be. I had already learned that owning a jet or at the very least flying privately is a must when traveling to Europe.  Now that I was  disabused of any further Clark Griswold-like naiveté  excitement, I felt equipped to face my Swiss vacation head on and without anxiety.

I  learned never to flinch at the cost of flying first class or business class even though it costs anywhere from four to five times more.  Flying coach has a way of transforming a human into a farm  animal, so I’m willing to fork over an extra two or three thousand dollars in order to avoid this eventuality.

The best way to understand the many barriers one faces in the effort to enter to the land of fun and frolic  is to accept that normal life is like a force of gravity. It pulls you down as a magnet pulls down a piece of metal. It is no easy thing to escape gravity.  We humans have a hard time achieving fun, frolic or freedom.  Satan said it best during his discussion with God in  Goethe’s “Faust.” As Satan chats with God Almighty, he compares humans to crickets and says, “Humans are just like crickets, always trying  to leap up to the heaven, only to fall back into the mud again and again. It’s quite funny actually”

Not withstanding Satan’s unkind remarks, we are as intrepid as Clark Griswold, and hope lives  in our hearts and so off we fly to Switzerland.

Despite Satan’s dire remarks, I did enjoy Switzerland. Zurich was a dream come true. The Grand Dolder Hotel where I stayed overlooks the city and the river that flows by. The tram system works like a Swiss watch, always on time and always sparkling clean. Most of the Swiss  take trams rather than cars  and this has a way of bonding you to the community.

The Swiss are helpful, attractive, decent and polite. Swiss men are trim and tall and smiling. When I got to Switzerland, I immediately felt like a fat ugly American, but since I had just been reading “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann, I learned to acknowledge my inferior status and felt some freedom once I accepted my shamefully disgraceful pot belly.

The Swiss women look like blonde goddesses, with great tans, nice legs and drive Aston Martins or Porsches. Zurich was a lot like walking through a James Bond movie but without any of the shooting.  And riding a gondola to the top of the Alps  is just like riding the gondola in Disney World  except the Swiss gondola is 2,000 feet above the ground where as the one in Disney World is about 30 feet in the air.

I can say that Switzerland is a marvel and similar to other great destination spots like Capri, Paris or Barcelona because it produces  the wish to move there and live happily ever after.  But those kinds of things only happen in books and movies.

So for now we will have to settle for these brief sojourns to heaven and just like “The Divine Comedy” one must  accept the fact that the  only way to get to heaven or the Swiss Alps  is to first go through hell.