An essay for The Annual Dream Vacation Scholarship by Cape Cod Vacation Rentals

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I don’t know if the perfect vacation exists. The more I think about it, the more I realize: I want everything.I want the silence of the wilderness and the chaos of a city. I want solitude and the company of friends. I want a vacation that lets me be entirely in my own world one moment, and completely immersed in someone else’s the next.I want history. Not tucked away behind glass, but beneath my fingertips.

I want to run my hands over centuries-old stone, to feel the weight of time pressing into me. I want to stand in places where civilizations rose and fell, where revolutions sparked and empires crumbled. I want to see the past not as a chapter in a textbook but as something I can breathe in. I don’t want to wait in line for a postcard moment, I want to wander ruins, pause in hidden corners, and find stories in the silence.

At the same time, I want a city that never sleeps. Streets packed with people, neon lights flickering overhead, the scent of food from a dozen cultures tangled in the air. I want music floating out of open doors, art painted on sidewalks, late-night cafés, and bookstores that never close. I want to eat breakfast at midnight and buy a novel at 3am. I want to sit with a cup of something hot, watching the world blur by, knowing I have nowhere to be but here.

I want to feel safe in my own skin. To walk freely, unapologetically (queer, soft-bodied, curious) and never feel like I need to shrink to make others comfortable. I want to exist in a place where difference isn’t decoration or spectacle, it just is. Where the world has made space for people like me, and no one questions why.

But I also want nature: towering trees, ocean air, and a hammock that sways just enough. I want hours of stillness and a bathtub so deep it feels like its own small ocean. The Milky Way is visible above me like a map I haven’t learned to read yet.

I want time to be alone. To wake up with no plans, to take a wrong turn and follow it anyway, to find a bookstore down an alley, a street performer with a cello, or a market full of spices I don’t know the names of. I want to drift through a place like fog; light, curious, unbound.

And I want a friend. Someone to laugh with, to share strange snacks and strange ideas, to pull me out of my own head when I need it. I want to push each other gently past our fears, to try things we’d never do alone. To learn from each other in a new place, and see the world through double vision.

I want to be part of something, too, a group of strangers who stop being strangers by day two. I want a guide who loves what they teach so much that I love it too. I want to sit around a fire with people I’ve just met and feel, for a moment, like we’ve known each other forever.

I want it all to live in one place: maybe a compound on the water or a small artist-run resort. A place with hammocks and jazz clubs, tidepools and trains, history and street food. A place where I could wake up and swim to breakfast, wander to a gallery, and stumble into a concert by nightfall. I want seventeen versions of joy packed into one walkable stretch. I want convenience without sameness, adventure without exhaustion.

And then I want to leave it all behind. I want to ride the tourist bus and the pedicab. Take the walking tour and get lost. I want to try the must-eat dish and the weirdest thing on the menu. I want to check off the famous landmarks, then find a local bookstore that sells zines and handmade notebooks. I want to walk across a border just because it’s there. To stay awake for forty-eight hours and fall asleep knowing I lived every second of it.

I know the perfect vacation doesn’t exist in a single place. You can’t have ancient history without crowds, or peace without pause, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking.

Maybe that’s the point. My dream vacation isn’t a destination. It’s a pursuit, of art and history, of taste and quiet, of self and world. It’s the moments that make you feel both small and vast. It’s the right silence in the right city. The strange meal with a new friend. The sky you’ve never seen before but somehow recognize.

That’s what I’m chasing.

That’s the dream.