As people hunker down in survival mode, leisure travel is being discarded as a luxury. Business travel has been trimmed to the bone, being replaced where possible with virtual meetings in cyberspace. Just how much the travel industry has contracted depends on who you ask, but overall revenue is down sharply.
You need a break!
Still, before you decide to work through the year and remove a vacation from your budget, consider whether it might actually be false economy. Breaks—whether they are five or ten minutes each hour, or five or ten days each year—can provide energizing oscillation that will actually make you more productive than you would be if you kept your nose to the grindstone.
Great deals right now!
And right now, the travel vendors are offering amazing promotions. At least once a week a deal that has me rubbing my eyes rolls off my fax machine. The latest: $401 per couple for 6 days and 5 nights in a 4-star all-inclusive (3 meals a day) Cancun resort. The one catch is that they are strictly one-day sales; buy them that day or forget about it.
Of course, you still have to get to and from Cancun. But if you have some frequent flyer miles to use, you really can’t stay home that cheap!
If this type of vacation is out of the question even at the promotional pricing, take heart: You can go to the other extreme and still get tremendous benefits.
After this, you can do anything!
Dr. Nick Hall, a medical scientist who puts together team-building and motivational programs for major corporations, advises us never to take a nice vacation. “Subject yourself to misery,” he says in his “I Know What to Do, So Why Don’t I Do It?” presentation. It gets a laugh from the audience, but he is actually quite serious.
Hall goes on to describe “the same miserable vacation” he and his family took every year when his kids were growing up. Just as the summer heat was peaking, they would leave Florida—sometimes in a convoy with several other families—and head for western Iowa to take part in RAGBRAI, an annual organized bike ride across the state.
Participants pitch tents in the fields at night and take cold showers in car washes or cattle-washing stalls. Don’t even ask where—or more to the point, what—the ladies’ rooms are along the way. And don’t be surprised if you find yourself stuck on a hill with a broken axel in a driving thunderstorm (as Hall and his wife, riding tandem, did one year.)
Such vacations are cheap and offer some great exercise, but the main benefit can be what Hall calls “cycle therapy.” For at least a year afterward, you will be able to deal with just about any kind of adversity by remembering the worst aspects of your vacation, and using these memories as the object in an “I am glad I am not” exercise. Conjure up a vivid image complete with the sights, sounds, smells, bad weather, bugs, and even the emotions you were feeling at the time, and contrast it with the immediate situation or challenge.
“When you create an image like that, you can do just about anything,” Hall concludes.
