In praise of the non-optimized vacation

Here we are, together, again.

John and I have a strange little game we like to play — you might call it, Whose Childhood was Less Fancy? A representative first volley: we didn’t have a dishwasher. To which the other might respond, our van was 21 years old.

While domestic trappings are a good place to start, the game really ratchets up when we move on to childhood vacations (or lack thereof). On this ground, we’re pretty well matched: on both sides, almost all of our travels were road trips to stay with family.

This is not a misery Olympics, even though at first blush it might sound like it is: we both have the happiest memories of the simplest things (and, honestly, we’re probably too proud of it). For John, it’s a hallway candy dish and morning cartoons and swimming in the backyard pool at his aunts’ house, cousins just down the Ohio street. For me, it’s picking huckleberries and tripled casseroles and an over-warm bunk room filled with siblings and friends, bell buoy tolling through the open window.

All this to say: I have a deep fondness for the humble family vacation — preferring it, in most cases, to the optimized, Instagram-ready vacation.

I try to keep this contrarian preference in check, but it bubbled up when I read a post on one of my favorite blogs a few months ago: Best Family-Friendly Vacation Spots, it was titled. The author listed a few of her hopeful destinations — Anguilla, Auberge Primland, Hawaii, Blackberry Farm, San Sebastian, Tuscany, the South of France, Portugal, Nantucket, Japan, Norway — and then solicited recommendations from her readers in the comments.

I couldn’t help myself. While others chimed in with elegant, far-flung locations, I stubbornly put in my oar for the simple and repeated: “We know we are forgoing opportunities to travel more broadly by returning to the same places,” I wrote, “but the gift of having time with extended family and feeling seen, known, needed, and loved in tight community is, for us, worth it.”

It’s not that I don’t want to travel the world. It’s not that Hawaii, Portugal, or Norway don’t sound amazing. I hope to go to them someday! It’s just that I know life requires trade-offs, and that I’m so convinced of the value of the simple, repeated family vacation that I’m willing to prioritize it over almost anything else.

I wasn’t able to express all of that in a brief comment on a random Tuesday. But here, with a little more time, is what I would have loved to offer to the conversation, and what I’ll offer to you:

An Ode to the Non-Optimized Vacation

Here we are again, the same but different.

The same lake, the same campground, the same island, cul-de-sac, beach town, shore. The same grandparents’ home, the same soft-around-the-edges cottage, the same ramshackle restaurants and backwater grocery stores.

It’s probably an ordeal to get here, likely involving a road trip or a puny airport with no direct flights. It requires work to arrive, but not the kind you’re used to: no Reddit rabbit holes, no complicated itineraries, no researching at all, really: you know the options already. You go with what’s been done before, what’s good enough. A rest for the logistics-weary brain.

If you’re lucky, you are not the only one traveling in: siblings, parents, nieces and nephews are all making the pilgrimage, too, all juggling time zones and schedules to arrive in the same place at the same time. You go not because of what you know will happen but because of what you can’t know will happen:

The precise, random moment your sister unburdens herself. The wisdom your aunt dispenses while stirring a pot. The instances of extraordinary candor, the episodes of exquisite tenderness, the intimacy that can’t be engineered at an appointed hour. The nothing moments. The everything moments.¹

There is simply no substitute for physical presence.

And oh, all your beloved people. All your beloved, confounding, cantankerous people. Stripped of flashy sites and dazzling amenities, on a non-optimized vacation you are left with the people around you — and somehow, despite the cousin dust-ups and simmering resentments and assumptions that are at least five years out of date, they are enough. They are the whole show.

What do you do in this slowed-down world? Well, you’ll probably have to do the dishes, to start, or wipe down the counters just like you do at home. But maybe you’ll get to do it elbow-to-elbow with a brother. Maybe you’ll even be serenaded by the harmony and melody of old camp songs as you suds and rinse, suds and rinse.

You will play solitaire, probably many games of it, probably with soft, dog-eared cards. If you do, a relative will probably peer over your shoulder and point out all the moves you haven’t yet made but could.

You’ll probably walk. A lot. Maybe that will even be the main activity. That’s what you’ll have to tell someone when you get home and they ask about your time away: “Yes, on my vacation, we took walks.”

Or maybe there’s an aging boat, a float you can swim to, a rope swing, a few fishing poles and cardboard containers of bait. Long afternoons in the sun dipping in and out of conversation and the pages of your book. A flair of excitement when the matriarch presents individual boxes of sugary cereal to the grands. Laughter, lots of it, even some of the hysterical kind.

You will eat the most basic of meals — spaghetti, hot dogs, sloppy joes, whatever can be thrown on the grill for a crowd. But maybe, if you have that sort of family, you’ll sing in a round before you tuck in: For health and strength, for health and strength, for health and strength…

If you’re lucky, you’ll get to measure your own growth by the changes in familiar landscapes, measuring what’s changed inside by what hasn’t changed outside, or by the changes you see on the faces you love. Here we are together again, you’ll say. The same, but different.

So lucky — yes. You are lucky: to have the family, to have the place, to have the means to gather. But you are also dedicated: to the idea of the simple, repeated family vacation. To undistracted minutes, hours, and days. To remaining central in each other’s lives.

In choosing the non-optimized vacation, we step resolutely off the hedonic treadmill. We remind ourselves that we can be happy with plain, with little. How countercultural, in this world that tells us to do more and explore more and then show it off to followers, to choose the familiar.

It can feel less-than to return, not so shiny. But hold your head high. Returning does not good content make — but it does make a good life.

Here we are together again.

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1. Hat tip to Frank Bruni and his incredible essay “The Myth of Quality Time,” which I read in 2015 and still think about often.