The Staycation is Here to Stay
The Staycation is Here to Stay
In the summer of 2023, my wife and I took our family on an epic vacation tour of Scotland. We splurged for first class airfare, rented beautiful VRBOs, hired a guide to take us on a private tour of the Highlands and the Isle of Skye. It was the first time we had our whole blended family together in quite a while as my daughters are grown, working, on their own and challenging to pin down schedule-wise. It was going to be the vacation of a lifetime.
Except, it wasn’t.
I have no beef with Edinburgh or the Scottish people but there’s no easy way to say this. Edinburgh was a disappointment – at least the parts of it we saw. The weather didn’t cooperate and our first day was a washout. The restaurants we chose were…below expectations (I’ll come back to that word “expectations” later). Our rental for our two nights in Edinburgh was, unfortunately, around the corner from a strip of popular pubs, so no sleep was to be had those first two nights as rowdy drunks passed by our bedroom windows at all hours of the night and into the wee hours of the morning. The showers in our historic VRBO didn’t want to generate hot water and had very little water pressure. And Edinburgh itself didn’t impress – the part that tourists like us see is basically a castle on one end and palace on the other, separated by a strip of tourist trap shops, pubs, and coffee shops (including the ever-present Starbucks).
The Highlands and Isle of Skye were beautiful, and Andrew our tour guide was charming and intelligent. He picked us up in Edinburgh in a tricked-out Sprinter van wearing traditional Scottish garb and chauffeured us around those gorgeous areas of the country. So that leg of the trip was much better.
Just one problem: we were all grumpy due to lack of sleep and the disappointment of Edinburgh. I was constantly breaking up skirmishes between my daughters. As I had to pry one more daughter from taking yet another social-media-ready selfie in front of a waterfalls or castle so we could stay on schedule, I became grumpy. As the cost of the trip added up and exceeded our budget, I became even grumpier. By the last night, we were all ready to be home. But another skirmish broke out at the dinner table. When everyone settled down, one of them asked my wife, “Holly, are you OK?” And when I turned to Holly, who was seated to my right, I could see she had her head bowed and tears silently streaming from her eyes.
“What’s wrong Love?” I asked.
In a barely audible voice, she replied with words that broke my heart: “I thought this would be more fun…”
Holly composed herself and we departed the restaurant, silent all the way home in our Uber. I won’t go into details, but it got worse from there. Back at our VRBO, the blame game started, then escalated, and my daughters devolving into a screaming match. The next day, as my daughters departed for home, nobody was speaking.
One last problem. Storms on the east coast meant two of my daughters were stranded and would now miss a day of work they didn’t plan on. One was dumped off in an airport three hours from home and told to either wait several hours for a bus to handle the final leg or find her own way to her final destination (she took a costly Uber for the three-hour drive from JFK Airport to her home in suburban Philadelphia). The other was stranded in Boston and had to catch a flight home the following morning, adding another night of hotel stay to the already-stretched vacation budget. Holly, my stepdaughter and I had our flight canceled and had to stay in Edinburgh another day even though after the stress of the trip, all we wanted to do was be home.
It was not the epic vacation we planned. As Holly noted at dinner that last night, it wasn’t even fun.
Is a vacation really relaxing?
If anyone asked me my hobbies before the Scotland fiasco, I would have included traveling on the list. I took some epic vacations with my daughters on the heels of my divorce. We drove the Pacific Coast highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and two years later did the same thing on the northern part of the highway from Seattle to San Francisco. We hiked the Grand Canyon and visited Sedona, Arizona. We visited several countries including Iceland, Switzerland, England and France. We took a camping trip starting in my hometown (Tulsa, Okla.) and traveled in my Jeep throughout Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. On another Colorado trip we rented a completely off the grid cabin and explored various Rocky Mountain Jeep trails for a week. There were also two pilgrimages to Disney mixed in there – not my kind of vacation but a rite of passage for an American parent, especially a divorced dad.
But when I looked back at these vacations, while epic memories were created, all of them had some similar form of stress. Not to the extent we experienced in Scotland, but stress, nonetheless. All of them were expensive. All of them involved a great deal of planning and varying degrees of execution. All of them involved some degree of skirmishes between people who at certain times want to go in different directions. The pictures we captured on those trips show smiling faces on once-in-a-lifetime locations, but they clearly don’t tell the whole story.
Enter the Staycation
After we got back home and regrouped, Holly and I concluded that (1) we were both tired of traveling, and (2) we wanted a home that could do double-duty as a vacation retreat. After the Scotland experience, it would be staycations for us from now on.
This was in line with other goals as well – I had been looking for land in the country where I could explore, enjoy the outdoors, camp out, and learn to take care of the land. We had long discussed having a pool in our backyard, but our current home didn’t have the space for it due to utility easements. So, we began searching for a new dream home with acreage and a pool. After a several month-hunt, we found the perfect place – just a half hour from downtown, but with 9 acres and a resort-like pool. It backed up to a massive cattle ranch, so the property enjoyed horizon-to-horizon views of rolling hayfields and uninterrupted views of both the sunrise and sunset. Yes, it was more expensive than the home we owned, but we would be able to put our vacation budget into the mortgage payment and kill two birds with one stone. We caught a lucky break when our bank ran a special on mortgages with rates a full point below market. A bonus was that our existing home, which was financed with a 3% COVID-era mortgage, had a below-market mortgage payment and could be turned into a rental property generating passive income to further offset the mortgage on the new place. It was a win/win/win. We moved in the spring of 2024.
Staycation #1 – July 2024
After completing the move, Holly and I both took the first week of July off to enjoy our new home and relax. It was beautiful. There were no flights to catch (or flight delays), no TSA agents to rifle through our belongings and toss our shampoo because it was not under 3.1 ounces, there were no tourists to compete with for dinner reservations. There were no expectations (there’s that word again – more on that later, as promised) and no timetables.
We slept as late as we wanted, enjoyed coffee poolside just steps from our kitchen, planned delicious home-cooked meals, and enjoyed each other’s company. We didn’t have to fight for a good poolside seat. We didn’t have to wait for service. We didn’t have to stand in lines with other tourists to see whatever attraction was on the agenda that day.
By the end of the week, we both agreed: Best. Vacation. Ever. We were completely relaxed and detached from work. We had spent incredible quality time together. We slept in our own bed, in our own home, we enjoyed the silence and stillness, and we recuperated the stress of from our respective jobs.
Staycation #2 – October 2024
Later in October I was able to take another Staycation for the first week of the month. I enjoy unlimited PTO from my employer, and the first week of the quarter is always super-slow for me. There were raised garden beds in the yard that we had ignored since we closed on the house – with so much to do it just wasn’t a priority. By the fall they had become completely overgrown with ragweed and grasses and such and become an eyesore. Plus, Holly was eager to learn gardening and wanted to plant a crop come spring. They needed to be cleaned out and readied for that.
So that was the first four days of my vacation. Hacking through the overgrowth, pushing the wheelbarrow to the woods in the back of our property to dispose of it, tilling the soil, pulling out the roots, and then covering the beds with cardboard and plastic sheeting so any remaining growth would die off by the time spring planting season rolls around.
It was exhausting, physically taxing work. But so fulfilling. At the end of the week, with the job done, I was exhilarated.
And when I reached my physical limit at the end of every day, I soaked in the now-cool pool water and recuperated on my backyard lounge chair with an ice water and a snack.
The remainder of the week I caught up on other projects around the house, and on the last day I treated myself to a round of golf at a local course I had wanted to try. And once again, it was a thoroughly relaxing vacation that allowed me to completely detach from the world, de-stress from work, and enjoy myself at home.
Staycation #3 – April 2025
My third staycation was more of the same. After a tough-by-Oklahoma-standards winter, there was a lot of work to do on the property. Flower beds to weed and mulch, lawn to fertilize, winter deadfall to cut up and dispose of, and new plantings to install. Plus, Holly was ready to start planting vegetables in the garden bed. So that’s what I did. For the better part of two weeks, I worked on getting the yard ship-shape for the spring.
Again, by the end of vacation, I was uber-relaxed and ready to leap back into work.
Tourism on the ropes
Yes, there is a lot of the world still to see. I enjoyed the vacations I took with my daughters (Scotland excluded), saw some incredible places, and created what I hope are lasting family memories. On one of our Jeeping trips, as we explored Canyonlands National Park in Utah, my eldest daughter said, “Dad, thank you for taking us on this vacation. I’m just going to have to marry a guy who likes to do this kind of stuff.” It was inadvertently one of the greatest complements she has ever paid me.
And there were places still on my bucket list. Patagonia and Norway were 1(a) and 1(b). I’ve never been to Asia or Australia or the Pacific Islands. I’ve never skied the Alps or ridden a motorcycle to Alaska or done a motorcycle tour of Europe.
But recently, a Facebook friend posted photos from a Kenyan safari. No doubt, the pictures were beautiful. Photo after photo showed her family smiling as they posed in front of elephants, or giraffes, or baboons from the safety of their Land Rover. And an inescapable thought occurred to me: we don’t belong there.
That native habitat for animals is now a tourist attraction. So, infrastructure is needed. There are roads that have been built through it. Gazebos are built so tourists can enjoy adult beverages and prepared meals while they gaze in awe. Vehicles now trespass on the animals’ homes, and people like my friend stop to ooh and aah and take photos for social media. It cannot not be disruptive. If I’m, say, a giraffe, and I want to grab lunch at my favorite savannah, now I have to worry about these humans who seem to be there every day disturbing me.
One particular photo haunted me. In it, my friend and her daughter are posing alongside the Land Rover with their guide, a Kenyan man who is dressed like he’s a pro at the local golf course, in khakis, polo shirt, and wind breaker with a ball cap and sunglasses on his head. He’s had to LARP as a westerner to appease his western tourists. And he’s become one more tourist attraction to pose alongside of for social credit points on Facebook.
This was not unlike Andrew, the Scottish tour guide, who showed up to meet us on day one in traditional Scottish garb. During the tour he felt the need to LARP as, well, a 17th century Scottish Highlander instead of wearing the jeans and sweater that he admitted were more his style – and which he wore for successive days of the trip when we told him it was fine with us.
And what vacation photos don’t show – and will never show – are the stressful moments like the ones my family experienced on our trip to Scotland. The arguments between people who often have different agendas. The long delays in airports. The constant pressure of the timetables to make it to this attraction or that hotel or to make it to yet another restaurant in time for the reservation. The TSA agent picking through your luggage. The discomfort of the airline seat on the several-hour flight to the destination. The hordes of other tourists.
Furthermore, all over the world, at touristed spots, tourist fatigue is taking root. Locals who just want to live their lives are lashing out against the too many tourists creating too much disruption to their daily routine. Quaint neighborhoods are being taken over by VRBO and Airbnb properties, with many tourists failing to respect local customs. (Another negative to short term rentals – the depletion of housing stock, which in turn causes local housing costs to escalate.) The simple act of taking the family out to dinner becomes a chore as locals fight for reservations alongside tourists. The daily commute to work gets disrupted by, for example, Sprinter vans lined up on the streets of Edinburgh to pick up those who have paid for guided tours of the Highlands. The favorite local trattoria gets replaced by yet another souvenir shop, selling the same overpriced tchotchkes as the one just a block away.
The overtourism is evident in the numbers. In 2014, when my daughters and I visited Iceland, there were 900,000 visitors to the island country. By 2023 that figure had swelled to 2.4 million!
From Barcelona to Bali, from Amsterdam to Australia, the locals are starting to fight back. The internet is replete with news stories of ordinances being passed to tamp down tourism. Local governments are passing new tourist taxes. Venerated sites are being permanently closed to visitors. And protesters are even staging hunger strikes to draw attention to the problem of overtourism.
And for those concerned with pollution and climate change – it’s best if we all stay home. From cruise ships and airplanes that add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the ton, to the trampling of native flora and fauna by hordes of tourists, to the construction of roads through savannas that were once home only to animals, tourism is disruptive to the environment.
So, while there’s no getting around the fact that tourism provides funding for local initiatives, more and more people are asking: is it worth the cost. Seemingly, the answer is becoming a very simple: “No”.
Expectations
As I unpacked the Scotland experience, and tried to understand how it went so wrong, I kept coming back to that word: expectations. The recovery community has a saying that is relevant here: “An expectation is a pre-meditated resentment.”
And so, when I looked at my part in what went wrong on the vacation, it was that I had very high expectations for the trip. In my minds’ eye, it was going to be a lovely coming together of our blended family. My teenage stepdaughter would bond with my girls. My girls would get to know my wife, who I married in 2020: Holly and I live in Tulsa and my daughters live in Philadelphia. Andrew would regale us with stories of the Scottish Highlands, and we would soak in the beauty of the place, in a state of joy and bliss.
What I didn’t factor in was that we were a collection of six people with different agendas, different triggers, and – yes - different expectations. So, from the start, when the vacation didn’t meet my expectations, I got resentful.
I wonder how many of my friends, who post blissful pictures on social media of their vacations, experience the same kind of disappointment that I did in Scotland. You see the pics of the family in front of the Roman Colosseum, or Eiffel Tower, or Hollywood sign, but we don’t see or hear about the things that went wrong. This also makes me wonder: for how many of us, are vacations really relaxing?
For me, they’ve been a mixed bag. There have been great vacations with very little stress (the off-the-grid cabin rental in Colorado) and those with very high stress (our London/Paris trip over the December holidays in 2017, which I won’t go into in detail. But we did post some beautiful pictures on social media!)
And then there’s the airlines
Ultimately, one of the biggest factors that made me decide to throttle back on travel has been the airlines themselves. I hold them in very low esteem. I have said for quite a while that from the time you buy your ticket, until the time you land back at home with suitcase in hand, you’re not a customer and you’re not a passenger. You’re a prisoner. They can basically do anything they want to you: strand you, make you sit in a wickedly uncomfortable seat for an unreasonably long time, lock the bathrooms on the plane and not allow you to relieve yourself, change your schedule, make you sit in an uncomfortable, overcrowded airport while they sort out whatever drama they’ve invented that day, make you sit in your airplane seat at the gate while they figure out who can drive the jetway to the airplane door. Just to name a few.
Even airlines that have been in business since the dawn of aviation act like they are a startup on their first day of work, figuring out how to effectively get an airplane from one airport to another. So, I’d rather not do business with them.
Conclusion
I’m not saying I’ll never travel again. I’d still like to take a motorcycle trip to Alaska or tour Patagonia or Norway. I’d like to return to my favorite resort in Cancun and relax on the beach. But it’s not the priority it once was. Yes, I won’t have the social-credit-generating photos for Facebook. But what I will have from my staycations is ultimate relaxation.
I think we would all do well to travel less frequently. We would save money and protect the environment while reducing our stress. And we might also preserve family harmony in the meantime. But most importantly, we would allow locals to live and enjoy their own lives - in their own homes.