Seven Golden Rules of Vacationing - Yagna Pant

With spring already in its start, sum-mer in the near horizon, the gasoline price drastically increasing at the pump and the student academic year approaching its end, we are constantly reminded that our vacationing time is nearby. In fact, most of the families that I know of are already planning for a summer vacation – whether it’s going to Nepal or Europe, or taking a trip to South Africa! Some family members are already demanding and threatening that this vacation be better than the previous year’s or else! You will hear that failure to schedule a vacation for the entire family may cause some important bones in the body to be broken; the person who did not schedule a vacation may face severe sanctions from other folks! Last weekend, we went to our park district for registering our kids for the summer camp and we have a rough schedule on what we are planning to do this summer! I presume I should be safe here.

Take a casual glance around us, there is a lot of hype about vacationing. Travel agencies are constantly promoting their deals. Most national newspa-pers have a regular section about vacation and travel. A news anchor at a popular cable station talks with some journalist who is vacationing far away in the Chilean beaches or the calm waters of the New Zealand coast, and she trumpets that she is having a wonderful time! Or take the case of a family friend you know whose siblings are living in Europe, South Africa and Australia, and are planning an international family gathering / vacationing time in Thailand.

There are a lot of time-share companies promoting vacationing time. The common theme is that you purchase time-share slices in their companies, which then entitle you to a few weeks of international vacation time every year over your entire lifetime. What else could be better than that? They truly and honestly advocate that vacationing time is the biggest innovation since the invention of sliced bread and even the most important “experience” you can possibly buy for your money! For the rest, of course, you have the Mastercard! If you don’t have the money to buy these time shares, they gladly offer financing at reasonable (once in a lifetime) annual rate of 14.99% to 24.99% per anum! According to these companies, everybody has to buy these time shares as the quality time when you connect with kids and family is more important than purchasing groceries at the local supermarket. Kid’s education and other things are lower in the priority list once you fulfill your primary responsibility of taking the entire family to an expensive vacation treat!

Not only is the vacationing time one of the prime “water cooler” talking points around our offices but also when you meet a stranger at a party. A common starting point for conversation would be their “…last vacation time” or the next one they are planning to take in future. In almost all the cases, you will hear that their vacationing time was wonderful and better than that of anybody else! They will be happy to share some pictures with big smiley faces in the pages of popular social networking sites. So, given so much hype, I have attempted to jot down some truly golden rules about vacationing:

1) Vacation is an entitlement and it must be available for everybody automatically irrespective of ones’ accomplishment in the last year. In other words, this is one of the things in life that does not need to be earned.

2) Vacation is very important for the well being of the society and therefore every body must take it at regular interval – the quicker the interval, the better the outcome. In fact if we can manage to send all the people in unstable regions of the world to a fully paid vacation for 2 days, most of the world’s problems would be over!

3) Staying around the house and visiting nearby places (day trips) is no vacation at all. One must be very far away from home to be a on a true vacation. As an example, for people living in Nepal, vacationing time means they must come overseas to the US, Australia, Europe, Switzerland, even if they have hardly explored nearby places in their own countries – for it will not be categorized as quality vacationing time. For people living in the latter countries, they must go to remote places, otherwise their fun would be somehow limited!

4) The trip must be international and must cost over tens of thousand of dollars with any additional cost (the more the better) translating directly to your enjoyment, well-being and fun! In some sense this will help spur the growth of our slowing economy. Any cheapo travel does not qualify as a true vacation at all.

5) One must take lots and lots of “smiley faces” pictures and immediately post them in the social networking web sites (of course, the sooner the better) as if you were vacationing for the people monitoring your whereabouts! By the way there are some people, including myself, who rarely post any comments in these sites, but in general know what is going on around the town!

6) Once you reach the destination, you might be better off staying in your hotel room, getting up very late and doing things casually as you would be very tired from your long international journey. Afterwards, you might flick through the TV stations to find a local news anchor interviewing another journalist from your home town, and telling the audience how beautiful your own home town, an international destination, was. And you would repent whether you should have really spent all the money, time and effort coming to your international destination.

7) Once you return back from your vacation, send a message to your manager requesting to take an additional week off from work to recuperate from fatigue and tiredness from your 5 weeks’ long vacation!

Have fun and take your next vacation quickly!!

By Yagna Pant