Mark Simon, World Traveler.

Yeehaah! Vacation. Time to forget your clients, avoid due dates, gain weight, waste your mind and spend far too much money on crappy trinkets. A week later you'll finally unpack your suitcases to get rid of the stench of old clothes and you'll try to remember why you bought all that cheap crap.

This is all true, but something amazing can also happen. You can find inspiration.

If you are at all like me, you find it tough to take the time for a vacation. But it is important. Think of your creative self like your computer and follow the first rule of fixing all computer problems. Reboot. Taking a vacation is like rebooting your creativity.

I needed a reboot, so before Christmas, my wife and I decided to take a ski trip. The snow skiing in Orlando is terrible, so we packed up the kids and flew up north to Vermont.

If you've traveled by plane recently, you know to expect delays. Our flight was two hours late arriving. We didn't mind that as much as losing our luggage. Our kids didn't care; they just wanted to play in the snow. But when they found out that all their snow gear was in the missing suitcase they started to care... loudly.

We arranged for the ski resort to pick us up at the airport, but we couldn't find the driver. When we called, the resort couldn't find him either, so they hired a taxi service to drive us. An hour and 20 long minutes into a brief 45-minute trip, we know something was wrong. Our driver was lost in the mountains. It's a good thing she had that a brand-new TomTom GPS unit, which she spent half the trip talking about, mounted on her windshield. It never once dawned on her to actually use the damned thing.

Besides the annoyance of taking an unexpected tour of dark mountain roads, I had a never-ending litany of "Are we there yet?" questions coming from my twin boys, and "I'm going to claw my way through the driver's chest!" from a wife whose blood-sugar was crashing.

Not exactly a great beginning to our vacation, but I figured all the bad stuff had already happened, so the rest would be incredible. I was partially right; our missing luggage showed up first thing in the morning, we had fresh snow every day for a week, the skiing was great and I was inspired.

My wife, Jeanne, had created an animated show called Luke and Reece Save the World last year. We slowly worked on development together but it was slow-going. One night after a sub-zero day of gracefully falling down a mountain, my family passed out early. I pulled out my laptop and started to write a pilot episode.

Reece from Luke and Reece Save the World. © 2009, A&S Animation Inc.

With a relaxed mind and no worries, the ideas flowed like incoming credit card bills. Before I knew it, I was laughing out loud and the script was done. (Note to other husbands: Wives don't think anything is funny when you wake them up at 2:00 am to read them your script.)

Between snowball fights and blizzards, I started roughing out the boards and we recorded a scratch dialogue track and I edited an animatic. We found ourselves working on it every night and every morning. But it wasn't work, it was fun.

Remember when being an artist was fun? Sometimes all it takes is a change in our daily life to help us remember why we're artists and creators. It's fun!

On Dec. 21st, we were scheduled to return home. This is when the real fun began.

When we left that morning from the resort, a huge snowstorm was hitting all of Vermont. We checked our flight online, but the US Airways site is useless. All I could find out was that US Airways might still be in business. We got to the Burlington airport without getting lost in the mountains this time, but we were greeted by a line of passengers the length of the entire airport. Granted, the airport is only about 15-feet-wide, but the line looked huge in comparison.

As I glared at the flight board, I watched one flight after another being cancelled. What I didn't see was the flight we were looking for. While my family camped at the end of the line, I snow-shoed up to the front to ask about our flight.

A very nice and toothless (well, not completely toothless, but close enough and I couldn't look at anything else) attendant told me our flight was cancelled. She was kind, and toothless, enough to schedule us on another flight. Unfortunately, the flight was not going to Orlando, but it was to Washington, D.C., but at least we would be leaving Vermont. To make it even better, the flight wasn't leaving until the following afternoon.

Remember the days when an airline would put you up in a hotel when you were trapped? Evidently US Airways doesn't. The best they would do was to give me a phone number for a hotel that offered discounted rates. More expenses. Oh joy.

The hotel was nice enough. The biggest problem was that I have two nine-year-old boys who were really concerned about getting home in time for Christmas. ("Dad, why can't we go home?" "Dad, are we going to miss Santa?" "Dad, what's the square root of 225?")