Over the years, I’ve often waxed poetic about my love for slow-paced, long-term travel, but I’m also a big fan of what I’ve come to think of as “mini-vacations” as both alternatives and supplements to deeper, more involved explorations of the unfamiliar.
I use this term for a wide variety of adventures, ranging from three-day holiday-weekend jaunts overseas, to two-day roadtrips to nearby cities, to half-day expeditions across town to check out something or several somethings that’ve caught my interest.
Whatever the specifics, the terminology is important: these are vacations, so they should be relatively stress-free and should recharge my psychological battery, not drain it.
These trips should also be affordable in the monetary sense, and in terms of time and energy.
That will mean something different to each of us based on our financial situations and how many days or hours we have available in our schedules to spend on such ambitions, and how much of both we can spend without violating the aforementioned “stress-free” policy.
But for me this typically means cheap hotels or Airbnbs, inexpensive activities like parks, museums, and strange little local oddities (lighthouse tours, getting lost in labyrinthian used bookstores, attending experimental theatre productions), and transport that doesn’t break the bank (driving my fuel-sipping old Prius, or hopping a bus or train).
It’s sometimes possible to make the transportation and/or housing a component of the adventure: cute little roadside inns, oddly decorated Airbnbs, niche train lines, rented bike-based explorations—all may be worth incorporating into one’s plans and expounding upon as warranted.
It’s also possible, at times, to convert responsibilities into opportunities by adding side-excursions to a business trip, or incorporating little segues into a family reunion-focused journey.
In these circumstances you’ll typically either have part of your travel expenses covered, or will already have committed to paying for housing, food, and transportation for other purposes—so why not double-up on benefits from those covered or sunk costs by also leveraging them for other ambitions?
The low-stakes nature of mini-vacations means it’s easy to tweak plans on the fly and go with the flow, finding value and enjoyment in whatever happens, even if the outcome isn’t particularly extraordinary or Instagram-worthy; this isn’t a honeymoon trip, it’s not a family vacation to Disneyland, so if a mini-vacation fails to serve up life-defining experiences, that’s okay, there’s another one on the horizon (and you didn’t spend much on it, to begin with).
It’s also easier to take advantage of opportunities as they arise and work them into your schedule when your ambitions are moderated, in some cases even replacing all of your original plans with new ones after stumbling upon something interesting while in-transit to your original, intended destination.
Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of this type of travel, though, is that it’s feasible to weave it into one’s routine without having to radically recalibrate one’s life around the concept of perpetual perambulation.
That means you can take a lot of these sorts of trips, and you can do so without having to change anything else about your life.
It normalizes travel, basically, maximizing malleability and increasing the rate at which one is exposed to new things, while over time reducing the myriad (understandable) stressors to which many of us succumb when planning trips of any size.
If you can set aside a little time each month to look for unfamiliar, potentially interesting things on a map—things located within an easy travel radius for you and whomever you may want to bring along for the ride (there’s value in traveling solo, but these sorts of trips can also evolve relationships in interesting ways)—you can travel more frequently and work-out the muscles that make this sort of activity more accessible, enjoyable, and growth-oriented over time.
This, in turn, allows us to intentionally break our stride, upsetting our rhythms and rituals, which helps us view our typical lifestyle from an arm’s-length distance, granting us holistic, big-picture context and helping us make more informed decisions about what we prioritize and how we live, moving forward.
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