As you read this, I am vacationing on the living room sofa, flipping channels on our cableless television and wondering why I don't get up and do something useful.

Vacations run the gamut between simply sleeping in and taking it easy at home to once-in-a-lifetime trips to far-flung places.

Oddly, this year will provide me with both opportunities. This summer, I spent a week in Budapest, Hungary which for those of you not up on your geography is a long, long, far, far away place.

This week, I am at home, playing chauffer to my children, chaperoning school events and attending my children's ball games. And, yes, I'm working my way through that dreaded honey-do list my wife spent the last couple weeks preparing.

People have different takes on vacation. Some people I know take their vacations a day at the time, spreading out the time over several long weekends. Others, like me, choose to take their rest in chunks.

In my work, I spend a lot of time at a desk, or at meetings and events in the community. There's really no heavy-lifting involved, unless you count bringing our stack of newspapers in the back door each Wednesday morning. By the time vacation rolls around, I'm not usually physically tired, but the mental tiredness has reached its peak.

As a boy, vacations were almost always to Atlantic Beach, where we stayed at the Iron Steamer and spent our time on the now-defunct fishing pier.

The notable exception was the summer after high school graduation when our parents took us to Maryland and Delaware to visit the places of my earliest childhood memories.

My father, who was a Southern States store manager before we moved to Wendell, took us to see the places where we had lived before my sisters were born. We stopped at the Southern States in Dover, where my father worked last before we returned to North Carolina. He was hoping to see Pete, a deaf man with a severe speech impediment who had worked at the store for many, many years.

I remember getting out of the car behind my father and seeing Daddy and Pete meet. Pete remembered my father and called out his name excitedly. It was the one of the first times I'd ever seen my father's eyes get misty.

We traveled across the Eastern Shore of Maryland where my father had worked in Salisbury and drove through neighborhoods where my father and his employees had installed underground irrigation systems. The yards were still lush and green.

Now, checking out irrigation systems and visiting an old Southern States store my not sound like the sexiest of vacations, but it still ranks right up there at the top of my list.

Right behind the one I'm taking now.

However you choose to spend your vacation time, I hope you enjoy it. Make the most of it and get away from this rat race of a world.