Everybody likes traveling. It’s just the universal hobby everyone is supposed to have. There’s something amorphously sexy and chic about visiting exotic locales, interacting with indigenous populations, and marveling at local landmarks which appeal to our general well-being and happiness.
I guess I slept in the day they taught us why traveling is awesome. For me, most of the time traveling is an exhausting, expensive ordeal in pale comparison to, well, travelers’ descriptions.
Ok, that’s not quite fair; there’s quite a few types of travel most of us undertake, with varied amounts of crappiness. Going from the worst to the best type, then:
Business travel is the absolute worst. Sure, the company pays for my stay, but I’m there working (almost always with poor office accommodations), staying long enough to screw up my internal clock, and hence way too exhausted to take advantage of the new locale. At Factset, we use to be able to head over to HQ in Stamford, CT, which was only a short hour train-ride to New York City, and usually one or two people were crazy enough to head out to NYC every night; they did not fare well in the subsequent day’s meeting gauntlets.
The sightseeing tour is the next worst offender and encompass what most associate with the word “travel”. Checking out famous landmarks, trying out the local food, and snapping photographic evidence; there are the pillars that prop up the illustrious travel industry. The nice set of photos don’t convey the long hours spent on the plane or in the car, the uncomfortable hotel/motel stays (1), and the sheer density of like-minded people looking for the identical thrill being physically adjacent to a recognizable symbol. Which, you’ll admit, looked better in pictures anyway.
Now, one step better than just sightseeing is the travel-and-stay trip, a month or year spent in a foreign land actually absorbing the culture and seeing native foods. I respect the idea, but the logistics kinda suck: I’m not staying permanently, so I can’t really take everything with me; I’d probably have to work to make ends meet or just go really cheap; chances are, whatever cultural lessons I pick up from this accelerated assimilation won’t stick when I leave (2).
I relate the most with the getaway – a simple week-long trip somewhere, usually within reasonable driving distance. The timeframe is long enough where we get to explore some of the area (and yes, hit all the famous landmarks) without getting bored, take a break from familiar surroundings, de-stress from work and school, and I try to pad a few vacation days before and after the trip to keep myself in a relaxed state. So chill.
And the best kind – or so I’d imagine – has to be taking a month or two off to hang out at the summer vacation home. Facing the beach. With a laptop.
So I can blog about it, of course.
- unless it’s really bad, then it’s more of a prop for humor or possibly a lawsuit (↩)
- How I Met Your Mother had an awesome episode on this (↩)
re 2: i see allen returning from vacation with braided/shells in hair a la robin.