Staycations: Arguments for and Against

Editor’s Note: Recently we’ve been hearing a lot about staycations. So we asked Viator’s founder (Rod Cuthbert) and one of Viator’s most travel-loving staffers (Kelly) to ponder the following resolution. Resolved: That staycations are the new hot trend in travel. In true Lincoln-Douglas debate style Kelly argues the affirmative, Rod argues the negative. (What, you didn’t take debate in high school?)

The Case for Staycations
“With the price of gas soaring, a staycation is what most Americans will experience during the summer of 2008…”—Urbandictionary

I am not one to argue against heading out of town for a trip away, for an escape from the cares of home life. I do it plenty of times a year myself. But I also acknowledge that, unlike Rod, not all of us are jet-set company chairmen who can afford to take off on a whim. Airline travel is dreary at best, downright aggravating at worst. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and have you been in weekend Bay Area traffic lately?

I admit the rewards for all the security lines and grouchy flight attendants can be immense once you’ve arrived and are enjoying lying on a tropical beach or rambling through an interesting neighborhood, but the motivation can be hard to summon up. And, to being with, we’re all busy people with fairly meager amounts of vacation time.

I almost always travel the weekend before or after my birthday. Mostly, it is to avoid having a birthday party, which I view as a horrible punishment for turning a year older. But this year, I just couldn’t get away, friends are visiting and I am traveling over the Fourth of July holiday instead. But I really, really wanted to be on vacation. Having heard so much about staycations lately I decided to give it a go.

I admit mine might be an extreme form of staycation, I think generally people travel a bit, to a nearby big city or national park or something like that. I chose to embark on a staycation tour of San Francisco, specifically a MP3 walking tour of the Castro & Mission that starts three blocks from my house, at 14th Street and Market, so close that I had just finished the two-minute intro to the tour by the time I walked there from my door. Partially I chose it because the tour covers the Castro, San Francisco’s famous gay neighborhood, and last weekend was Pride, a celebration of all things LGBT in San Francisco.

Overall the tour was great, I won’t spoil all the details, but I learned a lot about the history of a neighborhood I walk through all the time. I saw murals I had no idea existed (shamefully, I have walked past one of them maybe a dozen times), climbed up hills I normally am not motivated to scale, and toured the inside of Mission Dolores, which I had never entered. I took lots of photos. And I had a surprising amount of fun. The MP3 tour was superb, really good directions and commentary—it even motivated me to tackle a big hill that I thought I might just skip over. There are places I walk past all the time and think someday I’ll go in there or check that street out, and I finally did.

On the down side, walking past your dry cleaners and remembering you have a sweater to pickup is not quite embracing the vacation spirit. To get away from it all, you physically have to get away from it all or there are reminders around every corner of things to do. I really enjoyed my MP3 tour, and if budgets or time are tight, I’d do something like it again, but I don’t think I achieved the total sense of wonder and bliss that a really good vacation stimulates.