Eleventh salon: What makes a vacation a vacation?

[jenett]

Welcome to the eleventh salon! Wander in, invite a friend to come along, and chat! (Not sure what's going on? Here, have a brief FAQ.) You can find previous ones in my salon tag. Please take a quick look at the reminders at the bottom of this post, too.

I am now on vacation, so you get vacation question, round two!

What makes a really great vacation for you? Are you a person who just wants to sleep and recuperate and drink thing with little frilly umbrellas in them? Do you want to go to interesting and unfamiliar places and explore the world? Do you want to do this with other people or on your own?

My usual vacation is either "Stay home and get things done on projects" or "Go visit people I like in place I am not currently living". The current vacation is the latter, though not in my most usual place for it, and I'm contemplating what it would take to go do two weeks in England in the fall of 2014. (which would be a Go See All The Things vacation, for slightly odd values of 'Things' because I've already seen most of the obvious tourist things, and have a very specific "This museum and that place" set of goals.

(I am currently in a room filled with interesting and fascinating people in person, and there will be other people around tonight, so comment replies slightly slower than usual.)

Quick reminders

- jjhunter did a great guide to following conversations here on Dreamwidth. Also a roundup of regular Dreamwidth events.
- If you want to post anonymously, please pick a name (any name you like) that we can call you - it makes it more conversational and helps if we have more than one anon post.
- Base rule remains "Leave the conversation better than you found it, or at least not worse". If you're nervous about that, I'd rather you say something and we maybe sort out confusion later than have you not say something. (I've heard from a few people who worry they're going to say something that's going to be taken weirdly. If it helps, I am usually around and if there's a thing you'd like to get out in the conversation, but you're not sure how, feel free to PM or email or IM me, and I'll nudge the conversation that direction.)
- The FAQ still has useful stuff, and I added some thoughts about getting conversations going a few weeks ago.
- Comments tend to trickle in over the course of a day or two, with a few nearly a week later: you might enjoy checking back later if you're not tracking the conversation.

Comments

[jjhunter]

A vacation isn't a vacation for me unless I experience a positive abeyance of my normal routines. (This is why it's easier to have a vacation somewhere other than where I usually sleep.) It's not so much a matter of sleeping in - I usually wake up as early as usual after the first morning - as doing and being different things than usual to facilitate stretching myself out of mental & physical complacence with my daily status quo and stock up on personal spoons to boot.

[jenett]

Oh, I definitely agree about the 'different from usual' part.

One of the tricks for me is that I don't reliably sleep well away from my own bed (I have this Thing about not liking white sheets most of the time, which makes things a little complicated.)

But yes, on different schedules. (I tend to sleep in, but that's because my natural cycles run sleeping 1am or 2am until 9am or 10am, and I normally have to get up for work at half-seven.

[cheyinka]

Do you have a hard time resuming your normal routines after that? I eventually hated any vacation from school longer than three days because I knew it'd take me at least the length of time my going-to-school (or going-to-classes, in college) routine had been disrupted for me to resume it.

[jjhunter]

Very rarely. I think making sure that I don't go too far astray from my usual sleep patterns throughout & upping the exercise component (part of how I replenish spoons), as well as budgeting some low-key transition time at the end (at least half a day, preferably a full one) to spend back at home helps a lot.