I'M ON A PLANE bound for El Salvador when it hits me: I'm having a vacation emergency.

It's been coming for months—I just didn't know it until now. I was so mentally fatigued I couldn't recognize my own weariness. Little things, stupid things were getting to me. I was irritable, irascible, intolerant, wretchedly humorless, snippy, snooty—in short, in the always candid words of my 11-year-old daughter, Teal, "a real big fat grump."

My 14-year-old, Addi, repeatedly excoriated me, as only a teenager can, for not getting out of the office. "Dad, you live in there!" But an afternoon off wasn't the answer, nor a long weekend. I tried both, but they were simply too short. My big, stubborn head never disconnected.

Sue, my ever practical wife, suggested I return to the Himalayas without an assignment. "Just go climb a mountain for fun, not for work," she told me. But oddly enough, a month of ice and snow and oxygen deprivation just didn't sound that appealing. I was thinking warm weather, cold beer, few clothes.

It finally dawned on me that what I really needed was an old-fashioned, honest-to-God family beach vacation.

We chose El Salvador for the promise of surfing and the potential for rock climbing. Besides, it's close, cheap, and would give us all another chance to practice (or, in my case, mangle) our Spanish. We invited five friends to come along: Pat Fleming and his wife, Erika Olson, and John and Mary Spitler and her 15-year-old daughter, Kaitlin Kominsky. I knew John and Pat, both ridiculously overloaded university math teachers, were dying for a vacation, and Sue was overdue for a break from her many school-board meetings.

We'd talked about organizing a group trip for years but had never been able to pull it off until now: We would vamoose for ten full days—a kind of communal antidote to burnout. Sue did all the planning and packing; like an ass, I worked right up until we left for the airport in the predawn dark.

Now, as the plane lifts off, I close my eyes and imagine warm blue waves tumbling over each other, the foaming water sliding up the sand. But then my lovely daydream is rudely interrupted by dreaded workthink—deadlines, arguments, expectations, all the ordinary nonsense stuffed inside the head of every working stiff in America. I yawn, as if by popping my ears I can blast the unwanted thoughts right out of my head.