A vacation worth repeating
Are you making plans for your 2009 vacations? Or are you, like many of us, wondering if you’ll be taking a vacation at all? Last summer people stayed home because of high gas prices. This year the financial meltdown has many wondering when, if ever, they’ll be able to take a real vacation again.
I’d like to suggest a vacation that my husband, Peter, and I have been taking for several years now. We’ve always had a wonderful time and afterwards, we were refreshed, relaxed and reinvigorated; not least because we had no fatigue from a long car trip or flight, worries about bad weather, road conditions or flight delays. In fact, we never leave our house.
I’ve written about vacationing at home in Illinois Times before — last March, in fact; and parts of this column are taken from that earlier one. But it seemed especially appropriate — and especially worth repeating — in these financially troubled times.
It may seem as if a home vacation wouldn’t be all that special, but the truth is that my husband, Peter, and I, like most people these harried and hurried days, rarely take time to savor the home we’ve created — on which we’ve spent a lot of time and more money than we like to contemplate. More often than not, it’s a nice backdrop to a host of activities, some pleasureful, but most of which are the “have-to’s” of modern life. Vacationing at home, we’ve found, doesn’t require much effort, but does require some planning. Surprisingly, the biggest effort — the hardest thing, especially the first time — was not giving in to guilty feelings that we should be doing something, not just lazing around. We kept reminding ourselves that if we’d traveled, we wouldn’t be feeling guilty. Our kids were grown by then, but I’d think that, depending on ages and level of cooperation, it would be possible to vacation at home with children, especially in midwinter when there are fewer activities.
Planning is crucial for a successful home vacation. Here’s a checklist we’ve come up with over the years: Decide which time(s) of year work best for you. Midwinter’s our favorite. Summer hasn’t been as successful when we tried it, but I know a Lake Springfield family that takes an annual week-long vacation at home in the summer, enjoying their boat and lazing around the pool. Make sure the house is reasonably clean and tidy. Nothing makes those nagging guilty feelings shout louder and be harder to resist than piles of dirty laundry and dishes or floors that need cleaning. Minor repairs need doing? Plan on getting them done ahead of time, or plan to deal with them at a later date. Make a rough plan. It shouldn’t be a tight schedule — that’d defeat the purpose — just a concept of how things will play out. The planning should be done jointly and the activities be ones you both enjoy.
What will you do? Reading, hiking, cards or games, watching movies, or even working on a creative project together? Will you stay in the entire time, as we do, or go out for some meals or to movies? Once you’ve decided, be sure to get necessary items in advance.
