Thoughts on Vacation, is a comedy of manners about raising children and how we are raised by them. It is the 6th novel in the "My Years of Apprenticeship at Love" sextet. In it we watch the main character, Walker Underwood, as he matures into being a father. The time line develops the same theme through several variations--parents are delivered from the suffering and loss of loved ones by seeing how their large world is really an aggrandizement of the child's small world. In a novel length chapter-- Mr. I (Crossing the Brain / Blood Barrier) this juxtaposition is used to carry the imagination into the nanoworld, giving a good account of this generation's zeitgeist.