Editor’s Note: Recently we’ve been hearing a lot about ’staycations’. So we asked Viator’s founder (Rod) and one of Viator’s most travel-loving staffers (Kelly) to ponder the following resolution. Resolved: That staycations are the new hot trend in travel. In true Lincoln-Douglas debate style Kelly argues the affirmative, Rod argues the negative. (What, you didn’t take debate in high school?)
The Case for Staycations
“With the price of gas soaring, a staycation is what most Americans
will experience during the summer of 2008…”
–Urbandictionary.com
I am not one to argue against heading out of town for a trip away, for an escape from the cares of home life. I do it plenty of times a year myself. But I also acknowledge that, unlike Rod, not all of us are jet-set company chairmen who can afford to take off on a whim. Airline travel is dreary at best, downright aggravating at worst. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and have you been in weekend Bay Area traffic lately?
I admit the rewards for all the security lines and grouchy flight attendants can be immense once you’ve arrived and are enjoying lying on a tropical beach or rambling through an interesting neighborhood, but the motivation can be hard to summon up. And, to being with, we’re all busy people with fairly meager amounts of vacation time.
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| Staycation pro: Kelly saw this SF transit mural for the very first time |
I almost always travel the weekend before or after my birthday. Mostly, it is to avoid having a birthday party, which I view as a horrible punishment for turning a year older. But this year, I just couldn’t get away, friends are visiting and I am traveling over the 4th of July holiday instead. But I really, really wanted to be on vacation. Having heard so much about staycations lately I decided to give it a go.
I admit mine might be an extreme form of staycation, I think generally people travel a bit, to a nearby big city or national park or something like that. I chose to embark on a staycation tour of San Francisco, specifically a MP3 walking tour of the Castro & Mission that starts three blocks from my house, at 14th St and Market, so close that I had just finished the two-minute intro to the tour by the time I walked there from my door. Partially I chose it because the tour covers the Castro, San Francisco’s famous gay neighborhood, and last weekend was Pride, a celebration of all things LGBT in San Francisco.
Overall the tour was great, I won’t spoil all the details, but I learned a lot about the history of a neighborhood I walk through all the time. I saw murals I had no idea existed (shamefully, I have walked past one of them maybe a dozen times), climbed up hills I normally am not motivated to scale, and toured the inside of Mission Dolores, which I had never entered. I took lots of photos. And I had a surprising amount of fun. The MP3 tour was superb, really good directions and commentary –it even motivated me to tackle a big hill that I thought I might just skip over. There are places I walk past all the time and think someday I’ll go in there or check that street out, and I finally did.
On the down side, walking past your dry cleaners and remembering you have a sweater to pickup is not quite embracing the vacation spirit. To get away from it all, you physically have to get away from it all or there are reminders around every corner of things to do. I really enjoyed my MP3 tour, and if budgets or time are tight, I’d do something like it again, but I don’t think I achieved the total sense of wonder and bliss that a really good vacation stimulates.
PS: Should you find yourself on the Castro District and Dolores Heights MP3 walking tour when you get to the Mission High School stop at 18th St and Dolores, take a detour to the Bi-Rite Creamery (cross Dolores and head a couple stores up from the corner), you will not regret trying a scoop of their homemade rocky road. Consider it an advance reward for the hill at Liberty in about 10 minutes.
The Case against Staycations
Let’s not start out by thinking that the staycation is some sort of new idea. It’s not. Before Thomas Cook got the travel industry started back in 1841, everyone staycated. Our 18th-century forebears were dedicated stay-at-homers: French writer Xavier de Maistre penned Voyage Around My Bedroom in 1794, and followed up a few years later with Night Voyage Around My Room. Here’s what the good folks over at Wikipedia have to say about the former work:
He praises this voyage because it does not cost anything, for this reason it is strongly recommended to the poor, the infirm, and the lazy. His room is a long square, and the perimeter is thirty-six paces. He travels rarely in a straight line; from the table he goes towards the corner, and then obliquely to the door, but while he initially intended to return to the table, should an armchair be found en route, he settles down on it immediately, and falls into a reverie. Later, proceeding North, he encounters his bed…
You get the picture. And of course you immediately think “that’s just silly.” Well, yes and no. There’s plenty to be said for economising; and who knows what hidden gems are still to be discovered in our own home towns. But let’s not kid ourselves that a New Yorker is going to get the same buzz from a New York harbor cruise as they would from a tour of Alcatraz in San Francisco. Or that a family from the Midwest would learn as much about the world — and themselves, perhaps — on a trip to the Wisconsin Dells as they would during a week in Europe.
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| Ask the kids what they prefer - a staycation or a real vacation?? |
Bottom line, a staycation is an admission of defeat. It’s staying home, which is what you do the other 50 weeks of the year. It’s boring, it’s dull, and it’s a poor, short-sighted decision for you and your family.
Oh, you don’t agree?
Well, let’s look at some stay / go options, and see what we can agree on; maybe I can convince you that deep down, you know what’s best for you. So, which of these would you prefer, really?
- Starbucks coffee, or coffee from any one of the 4,800 coffee shops within a 5 mile radius of the Colosseum in Rome?
- Your current sex life, or your sex life at the Marriott Resort on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where you can take moonlit walks on the sand, have cocktails by the pool, and they have those special Marriott beds?
- Your local amusement park or Disneyland Paris — which, by the way, is near Paris, where you are spending the day shopping while your partner has fun with the kids?
- More Law & Order — or, God forbid, Seinfeld reruns — or the Moulin Rouge cabaret?
- Dennys. McDonalds. Chinese take-out. Dominos. Or a walking tour of the best tapas in Barcelona? Falafel from a road-side vendor in Amman, Jordan? Barramundi, that you caught yourself an hour ago, in the Kakadu region near Darwin in Australia? Chicken Kiev… in Kiev?
- Trying to get your kids attention at home while they juggle Nintendo, iPod earplugs and calls from their friends, or dinner together on the beach in Costa Rica, laughing over the days events?
OK, that’s all a bit unfair, especially the part about your sex life, which is probably just fine. But you get the point, I think. Life is out there to be lived, and if the only obstacle is your desire to economise, well for heavens sake… it’s only money!
July 1st, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I am against Staycation.
Imagine tomorrow happens to be my last day of life (which I will never know), I think I will regret just knowing more about my neighborhood. There is still so much out there to see than just our neighborhood.
Besides, we work so hard more than 300 days a year, this few days of vacation is what we deserved.
Staycation may be an option for a while, but people will just find it silly. It’s like eating the same food every day for the rest of your life, you will just get bored.
Get a life, get a Vacation…
July 1st, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Can I vote both “pro” and “con”? The thing is, both sides of the argument make sense. Rod is right - a staycation feels like defeat somehow, an admission that (for whatever reason) you’re ’settling’ for the old familiar territory right outside your door. It feels unadventurous. Unexciting. It feels small.
But I also agree with Kelly. There’s something very real about exploring your own neighborhood more fully, discovering things you walk by every day, for the first time.
And maybe that’s the difference — Kelly did her staycation alone (presumably), and Rod is talking about families. Maybe the staycation is simply less interesting when mom, dad, and the 2.5 kids are involved. Staycations with the family? Unadventurous. Stayacations on your own, in your own city, interesting and possibly charachater building.
I’m on the fence.
Maybe we need a new term for holiday. How about a halfiday. Neither in your own backyard, neither halfway around the world. Somewhere in between.
July 1st, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Hmmm. Sex Life On Vacation (with kids) sharing the hotel room. I do like Hawaii though. Maybe Oahu has adjoining rooms that Waikiki is missing!
Our staycations are generally satisfied on the weekends exploring Sydney so I think I’ll stick to overseas Vacations!
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:28 am
I wrote a post for my blog last year about the advantages of staying at home on your vacation:
http://www.europealacarte.co.uk/blog/2007/06/30/7-reasons-to-take-a-summer-holiday-at-home/
I have to say as a travel blogger I was amazed how much I had missed that’s within a couple of hours drive from where I live, that I only discovered when I started exploring the area slowly to do research for my online destination guides.
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:42 am
“Should I Stay or Should I Go” – The Clash, 1981
Admittedly, this song was not written to ponder the question of whether a staycation was better than a “real” vacation. But, it poses the position that there’s an option at play, maybe even a middle ground.
For many, the choice of traveling to Rome (been there) or Darwin (been there) or Paris (been there) or Oahu (went there for a kona coffee at Starbuck’s – just kidding and wrong island anyway…) just isn’t an option. It could be folks are economizing. It could be that they’re saving to go away next year (or in five years). It could be that circumstances beyond their control that have nothing to do with cash flow just won’t allow for a “real” vacation this year, even though they’re a true traveler at heart (in my case, that’s the rub).
I can’t deny it. I long to be in Italy right now. Sitting enjoying a nocciola gelato along Lake Como, watching the boats go by. Viator has the Lake Como Full Day Tour from Milan for those fortunate enough to be headed to Northern Italy - my favorite place on earth. Rod is right – a scoop at 31 Flavors next door to the high school I attended 20 years ago (oy, pass the Mint Chocolate Chip and a shovel) just doesn’t compare.
But flipping to the next-door destination option, 40 million people visit New York City every year. I have lived within 30 miles of mid-town Manhattan my entire life, having gone to college and worked for seven years smack dab in the middle of the Big Apple. Embarrassingly, I have never been to the Top of the Rock, cruised on the Circle Line or visited Ellis Island. No need to shed any tears for me, I have been lucky enough to have visited the Vatican, Kakadu National Park and the Eiffel Tower. But, who’s to say that the experience I could have if I truly researched and explored New York (a 35 minute bus ride for me), wouldn’t be just as interesting as discovering the streets of Paris.
Well, ok. Simmer down now.
Seriously though – all those millions of people who come to my backyard on holiday don’t enjoy it just because they’ve flown for five, 10 or 20 hours to get here. They enjoy it because they are learning about the Lower East Side during a Rock and Roll Tour, or how to navigate the Subway during a private tour with a professional NYC Photographer. I can do both of those activities for what I would likely have to pay to check my luggage and eat a sandwich on a flight these days, or pay to fill my gas tank and download the best of The Clash.
So, stay or go? I say “Rock the Kasbah” and do both when you can.
Wiki Trivia - The Clash hit Number 1 with “Should I Stay or Should I Go” but only after the song was featured in a Levi’s commercial nearly a decade after it’s original release.
July 11th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Since this blog has adopted a style of starting with a quote, I will follow suit. How about ‘familiarity breeds contempt’? (No idea who claims that quote).
Contempt is a strong word, maybe the word should be complacency.
How does this relate to the subject at hand? Let me start by telling you a bit about my experience of staycationing:
I have been fortunate enough to live in, or on the doorstep of, some of the world’s most amazing cities - and I have never taken full advantage of this fact.
Asa teenager, I lived in Paris about 30 seconds walk from the Eiffel Tower and never once thought to climb it - or visit Montmartre, the Louvre, Tuilleries, etc. In my defense, I guess, there are plenty of other things to discover at that age and can I say, Paris is a great place for that! It is only on subsequent visits as an adult that I have uncovered all of Paris’ wonderful monuments and history.
As an adult, I lived in London for many years on the doorstep to Europe but come vacation time, destinations of 12 plus hours were the ones that held the appeal - Italy seemed like a dull staycation when the mountains of Nepal or beaches of Thailand beckoned.
Interestingly, the moment I moved back to Australia, Italy seemed like an exotic and highly desirable option. So my point is, maybe we don’t appreciate the familiar and easily accessible enough.
Those who can, and do, appreciate their own backyard are simply doing what we all do on vacation- discovering a world of different people, history, ways of talking, eating,drinking - they’re just not spending as much and they don’t have as many bragging rights when they get home.
Surely time off out to enjoy spending time with your family and experiencing new and different things is a great way to spend your time, no matter how far or close to home it is?
Keep travelling,
Pip
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