At Home Vacationing
When we come home from vacation, we often take the absolute last possible flight in order to stretch our vacation as long as possible.
There’s a massive downside to that strategy, however, and that is that we usually land in the Austin airport at 11:45 p.m., don’t arrive home until well past midnight, and then are expected to leap from bed, ready to jump right back into school and work at 5:50 a.m. the next morning.
Needless to say, we also then end up with nothing to eat, our suitcases sit in our bedroom for several days, and we have no clean clothing to wear. It’s a terrific system.
Actually, it gives me a headache just thinking about it.
Every time this happens (which, seriously, is every single vacation or trip), Bart says to me “Next time, let’s come home a day early so we can rest up from our vacation, get unpacked, and be ready to get back to real life.”
We never do, of course, because vacation time is too precious to use on unpacking!!!!
Then, this Christmas break, I ended up with six weeks off of school and three weeks off of work. And clearly, we weren’t going to go on vacation for five weeks (even we have limits, people), so we ended up back in Texas six days before I had to go back to work and two full weeks before school restarted.
We slept in. We watched movies. We unpacked. We sorted through all our closets. We took in old paint cans to be recycled. We donated two laundry baskets of clothing to the Salvation Army. We went out to dinner with friends.
It was oh so glorious.
Of course, it did make returning to work yesterday a little difficult since I was not only in vacation mode, I was in at-home-vacation mode.
But, hey, at least my closets are clean.
I think I need to take 2 weeks off and just work on stuff. That sounds so awesome. Sorry you have to go back though….
Your vacation-at-home sounds WONDERFUL. The “coming home” part of vacation is often the worst part when, as you do, we plan to come back at the last possible moment. We’ll have to try your strategy next time we have three weeks of free time to burn. So, uh, never. I’m so jealous.
Glad you had such a nice vacation! Both away and at home. My husband liked to stretch it till the last minute; I like to come home a day or two early. I convinced the husband to try it my way one year and he loved it so much he is now a convert of “home early.” :o)
Yeah for clean closets!
I always liked to wait until the last second to come home because then I didn’t have time to think or worry about having to go back to work or school. I’d still be in the “going” mode.
My husband, though, would probably never leave home if he had that option – which means he goes and comes back as soon as possible.
Tip: If possible, do your laundry before you come home. 🙂
Yes we like to have that extra day too. I have a hard time jumping back into real life when I get home from vacation!
Sounds blissful. Cleaning out closets is a vacation for me any day…I’m easily entertained.
I love at-home vacay days, actually. I wish I could take one every week!
I also wish I had weeks at a time off work/school/etc.
xox
Sounds amazing. I love sleeping in. Which is why I work freelance!
oh my- the whole getting in late the night before thing is the story of our lives. except flying into philly is amazingly obnoxious because if there is so much as even 7% chance of rain, the flights are all delayed. consequently, we get to sleep around 1:30 or 2:00.
and it may or may not be true that my [medical student/very busy] husband had to do all the unpacking this week because yours truly the slacker wife let the bags sit there for TWO WEEKS.
we’re coming home early next time.