Vacation Planning: If and Where to Go, and What "Vacation" Means

To most people, vacation means time away from their routine day-to-day lives. If they work, it is time coupled with some opportunity to do something different off work. It often involves time away from where they live, seeing different places and people - and maybe even doing things they would not ordinarily do.

But no matter what the specifics turn out to be, it is wise to consider several key questions in beginning your vacation planning.

What Is A Vacation To You?

The answer to this is not a simple or straight forward as it might, at first, appear. There are at least a couple of very different 'right' answers which include:

Time Away From Work: Time spent in one's own regular community, at home, but not going to work. In fact, not going to work is what defines the time as vacation for many people. Perhaps punctuated by local day trips to places a person does not ordinarily have the opportunity to get to, this may be an ideal (and, indeed, the least expensive) form of vacationing. I grew up in Boston and never walked the Freedom Trail or visited Old Ironsides (the USS Constitution for you non-Yankees.) Were I an adult there now, I might use some vacation time to do some of those type of local things.

Travel To A Different Place To Visit, Tour OR Relax: This rubric actually includes may possible combinations of those three motives for travel. None one of them is mutually exclusive from the others. But they each ARE different ideas about what a vacation is or might include.

Taken one at a time, 1 ) Visiting is generally going somewhere for the primary purpose of seeing a person or people you do not get to see regularly. These can be friends, family or people you have met that you'd like to get to know better - and/or who have invited you to visit with them. 2) Touring is the activity of visiting a Place or Places. This can include what I call 'activity vacationing' where the emphasis is on doing things one would ordinarily not do. 3) Relaxing speaks for itself. A calm, warm island paradise, for example.