We went to Maine for four days last week — more like three if you subtract the time it took to drive back and forth — I consumed two lobster rolls and one whole lobster, went swimming, more of a painful plunge in the fifty-eight degree ocean every day, took one hike and attended one wedding. It was entirely too short a trip. Now returned, I could almost be persuaded that the journey was a vivid figment of my imagination.
So what’s the ideal length of a vacation? Perhaps the best way to approach the question is not to assign a number to the exercise — a week? two? an entire month? — though my mansplaining ways sorely tempt me, than to determine what the goal of a vacation ought to be.
This is a highly personal question. For my youngest brother it’s to consume as many churches and museums before moving on to the next town or city. It’s also exhausting for anybody traveling in his wake and, if you ask me, deeply wrong. I’m enamored of the idea that less is more. If you’ll allow me to quote from a travel book proposal I’m working on:
“Three days -- which many today seem to consider an acceptable divorce from work -- isn’t a vacation. It’s a bathroom break. Being unable to tear yourself away from your job isn’t proof of how busy and important you are. It’s a character flaw.
“The Unambitious Tourist” — that’s the title of the book and also the philosophy that underpins the way my family rolls — “is based on the counterintuitive belief that the best way to wring the most out of life is not to squeeze too strenuously. Becoming one with a place requires that you slow down and perhaps even come to a complete stop.”
When I was a child we went away for the entire summer. When you’re a kid or even an adult and you’re not running away from something three months is entirely too long to be away from home. By the time we returned in September, mere days before school started, I was so homesick that I’d run to my room and hug my toys and books. Maybe I’m overdramatizing. But you get the idea.
I think the test of whether a vacation was long enough is that when you get home you see the place through fresh eyes. In my experience that requires a minimum stay of three weeks. I realize that not everybody can afford that much time away from work or afford it, period.
But I could make the argument that all of us are ultimately free to come and go if we’re willing to accept the consequences. But that’s a whole other story. Normally, my wife and I go to Maine for a week in the summer. One reason for our abbreviated stay this time is that next weekend we having a wedding on the West Coast. One wedding overlooking the Atlantic — and a splendid wedding it was — and the next enjoying a panorama of the Pacific.
But between the wedding in Santa Barbara and visiting friends in Los Angeles we’ll be away but six days. Deb claims we need to get back because we have a dog and grandchildren — the dog maybe, the grandchildren seem more than adequately covered by their parents — but the result is another abbreviated voyage.
I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for me. I’m simply arguing the purpose of travel, of spending all that money and suffering the routine humiliation that is air travel these days, should be to maximize your time on Earth, to experience a developmental leap or two. I know that’s a tall order. But travel increases the odds.
Another quote from that book proposal. This one doesn’t come from me but from Ralph Waldo Emerson. The 19th century essayist and philosopher made an astute observation about sightseeing. He said that insight occurs not once you’re fully acclimated to your surroundings but during that period of adjustment when you feel vulnerable and your senses are on edge. “Poetic creativeness,” he wrote, “is not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in transitions from one to the other.” That state of uneasy grace, he went on, “must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as possible.”
I agree. Up to a point. Your senses are certainly on edge when you get to a new place. But the reason mine are is because I’m worried that the train from the plane is taking me in the wrong direction or because in my disoriented state I’m a prime pickpocket target.
The sweet spot, after you’ve gotten a good night’s rest and learned the lay of the land, usually occurs a couple of days in. I know it’s time to go home when I start feeling guilty about taking too much time off work. Still, I can keep my demons distracted for a couple of weeks or more. Besides, I can always tell myself that I’m doing research.
Then again, aren’t we all? And all the time? That’s what it means to be human. To absorb as much experience as possible, to be in the moment — a cliche perhaps but one synonymous with our most memorable adventures — and to have stories to tell when we get home.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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