Since the summer of 2006 I have developed a tradition of working somewhere (as say, a chambermaid in a hotel) during the summer in order to write a series of newspaper articles about my experience.

This summer, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to write about vacation.

Vacation, after, all is a kind of work as well.

When you fall in love, the piece of advice you always get from a friend is, “Go on vacation together. Then you’ll find out if you really like each other.”

I didn’t want to write about my own vacation. Not only would that have been boring, but I was afraid that I would miss the essence of what vacation really is by writing about my own habits and rituals.

This winter, I put an ad in several Dutch and Belgian newspapers: “Author seeking family to join them on holiday during the summer of 2010 in order to write about the experience in a newspaper.”

I had expected 10 or perhaps 20 responses, but it turned out that almost 70 families were at least in theory willing to share their vacation with an author.

Since it was hard to select a family based on their emails, I organized auditions. These auditions were…let’s say a kind of speed-dating session.

Early this June, the speed-dating session took place in a hotel in Amsterdam. Almost 30 families from the Netherlands and Belgium were willing to travel to Amsterdam for this get-together. (In some cases, I reimbursed their travel expenses.)

Most people came with their complete family. Only two people came as single parents: a divorced father with a young child, and a mother with two autistic children.

I put myself and all the families on a tight schedule. Fifteen minutes, then a five-minute break and then the next family would march in.

Some of the families were aware of my work, but most of them had no clue about the person with whom they were willing to go on vacation.

Needless to say, one of the things I wanted to know was, why would you take a stranger with you on your family vacation? And on top of that, a stranger who was going to write about it?

Some of the families were, for various reasons, interested in the attention. Like the mother with the autistic children—she wanted to inform a wider audience about the perils and joys of living with autistic children.

But in most of the cases, the answer was boredom.

Many families told me, “With you, we expect some excitement during our holidays.”

At the end of August, I will travel with a young couple and their two young children to a Greek island. I hope I won’t be a disappointment.