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.

I can't. Instead I turn to Sue and start to say something about work.

But she won't hear it. "This is the rule," she says, cutting me off midsentence. "For this entire vacation, no talk about work. None."

What?! I look at her with what I'm sure is an uncomprehending stare, similar to the face my chocolate Lab, Meggie, gives me when I stop playing fetch—like, Hey, I thought we were having fun.

"You can do it," she says cheerfully, holding my hand as though I have some kind of grave illness. "You need to do it." It's a conundrum, to be sure: How to write a story about not working without, well, working?

I don't have the answer to that one, so I put on the headphones and pretend to watch a supremely inane movie even Reese Witherspoon can't salvage. But actually I'm trying to remember the last time I took a real vacation—one in which I mentally and physically vacated from work and everyday life for at least a week.

Slowly flipping back through the years, I search for a single trip in which I wasn't on assignment or scribbling notes for the next story. I decide it was probably when Sue and I traveled by chicken bus with Addi through Costa Rica. Addi got badly bitten by bedbugs in a cheap cabana on the beach. She was 13 months old. Wait a minute—that was 13 years ago.