PS: Should you find yourself on the Castro District and Dolores Heights MP3 walking tour when you get to the Mission High School stop at 18th St and Dolores, take a detour to the Bi-Rite Creamery (cross Dolores and head a couple stores up from the corner), you will not regret trying a scoop of their homemade rocky road. Consider it an advance reward for the hill at Liberty in about ten minutes.
By Kelly G
The Case Against Staycations
Let’s not start out by thinking that the staycation is some sort of new idea. It’s not. Before Thomas Cook got the travel industry started back in 1841, everyone staycated. Our 18th-century forebears were dedicated stay-at-homers: French writer Xavier de Maistre penned Voyage Around My Bedroom in 1794, and followed up a few years later with Night Voyage Around My Room. Here’s what the good folks over at Wikipedia have to say about the former work:
He praises this voyage because it does not cost anything, for this reason it is strongly recommended to the poor, the infirm, and the lazy. His room is a long square, and the perimeter is thirty-six paces. He travels rarely in a straight line; from the table he goes towards the corner, and then obliquely to the door, but while he initially intended to return to the table, should an armchair be found en route, he settles down on it immediately, and falls into a reverie. Later, proceeding North, he encounters his bed …
You get the picture. And of course you immediately think “that’s just silly.” Well, yes and no. There’s plenty to be said for economizing; and who knows what hidden gems are still to be discovered in our own hometowns. But let’s not kid ourselves that a New Yorker is going to get the same buzz from a New York harbor cruise as they would from a tour of Alcatraz in San Francisco. Or that a family from the Midwest would learn as much about the world—and themselves, perhaps—on a trip to the Wisconsin Dells as they would during a week in Europe.
Bottom line, a staycation is an admission of defeat. It’s staying home, which is what you do the other fifity weeks of the year. It’s boring, it’s dull, and it’s a poor, short-sighted decision for you and your family.
Oh, you don’t agree?
Well, let’s look at some stay/go options, and see what we can agree on; maybe I can convince you that deep down, you know what’s best for you. So, which of these would you prefer, really?
- Starbucks coffee, or coffee from any one of the 4,800 coffee shops within a five mile radius of the Colosseum in Rome?
- Your current sex life, or your sex life at the Marriott Resort on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where you can take moonlit walks on the sand, have cocktails by the pool, and they have those special Marriott beds?
- Your local amusement park or Disneyland Paris—which, by the way, is near Paris, where you are spending the day shopping while your partner has fun with the kids?
- More Law & Order—or, God forbid, Seinfeld reruns—or the Moulin Rouge cabaret?
- Dennys. McDonalds. Chinese take-out. Dominos. Or a walking tour of the best tapas in Barcelona? Falafel from a road-side vendor in Amman, Jordan? Barramundi, that you caught yourself an hour ago, in the Kakadu region near Darwin in Australia? Chicken Kiev … in Kiev?
- Trying to get your kids attention at home while they juggle Nintendo, iPod earplugs and calls from their friends, or dinner together on the beach in Costa Rica, laughing over the days events?
OK, that’s all a bit unfair, especially the part about your sex life, which is probably just fine. But you get the point, I think. Life is out there to be lived, and if the only obstacle is your desire to economize, well for heavens sake … it’s only money!
By Rod Cuthbert
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