Take a Vacation!
It is summer, after all! Mid-July edition - wellness, islands, mocktails, and other summer staples
Hi! I hope that you’re all having a great summer so far. Among my readers, I have Canadians and Americans and thus I hope you all had an excellent long weekend for Canada Day and the 4th of July and are fully in summer mode right now. :)
You might have noticed there’s a new look on this page! I am going to stick with this for a while. I wish I had some catchy one or two-word newsletter title but I am wordy and so here we are, no apologies. It captures what I want to talk about because it is broad.
This edition is all about summer vacations and vacations in general. In June, I had a chat with Jennica Day Cabrera, her Instagram handle is thevacationnerd, linked for your reference. Jennica lives in the Vancouver area with her family and is writing a book on the importance of vacations. Her book will focus on how critical is it for humans to disconnect and rest to recover from work and how to rethink vacation to help yourself with that recovery. I hope I’m summarizing that correctly, Jennica!
A little bit of background…
Jennica’s interest and research on the topic started because she was on her university’s wrestling team and was in peak athletic shape but also over-training, competing, and travelling to compete, and she burned out. Jennica was a kinesiology and psychology student and she realized the importance of rest and recovery. She realized both were necessary for both mental and physical health.
After finishing her undergraduate degree, Jennica lived and taught abroad in Mexico. In an effort to maximize her time there, she worked, took Spanish classes, signed up for salsa lessons, spent her free time visiting tourist sites in the Yucatan peninsula and Mexico City, and maintained a social life, etc. She realized while living there she was also doing a lot and was burned out trying to do it all.
After moving back to Canada, Jennica started a job in e-commerce while also pursuing an MBA. At her new job, the transition from being a teacher with ten weeks of vacation to being in the 9-5 world with two weeks of vacation was a difficult one and she started to feel burned out yet again. This time though, to find out how to reverse the burnout and not let it happen again, she started researching vacation and occupational health.
Jennica realized the biggest factor in the rest and recovery was not necessarily where she was going, but what she was doing. She started experimenting with her time off and questioning how long her vacations should be and whether she should take on one long one or several short ones. What activities should she be doing? After all of her research, she recognized that a lot of the science and information were incredibly useful but were not public and she wanted to share what she had learned.
She pondered starting a blog, but Jennica mapped out the most important learnings and she had the content and chapters for a book . She finished her book 6 months ago, it is currently being edited and comes out at the end of 2023! I will provide an update once it is available for pre-order or purchase. Her website is here.
I interviewed Jennica over Zoom and had some questions for her that were a bit conversational.
Firstly, I asked Jennica to define vacation versus travel.
Jennica: We have been marketed to, [the idea] that in order to take a vacation you have to travel. Travel and vacation are two separate concepts and in society, they seem joined together. I always say that you don’t need money to vacation, because you don’t have to go anywhere. You can vacation and travel or you can do a staycation in your home (and not travel) or you can travel and not vacation, like work remotely abroad. Right now, too many people confuse them for one and the same. I’m trying to define vacation as occupational recovery. You can recover from work by reading a book, going for a walk, or detaching from work or stress.
Jennica loves to travel and has backpacked all over South America for six months and solo traveled in India. But vacation means detaching and is necessary whereas travel doesn’t have to happen for work recovery and work recovery is what we need!
Jennica mentioned that it was particularly unusual during the pandemic because those who still worked didn’t take time off because there was nowhere to go. I think more than ever, we all deserved a break in the pandemic and disconnection without the worry and dread and wondering when it would be all over.
I asked Jennica what the most valuable feeling would be for her what is the goal of a vacation aw does she want to feel after one.
The most important feeling one should have depends on the person and their individual interests and values, whether they want a city break or nature, etc. However, there is a lot of research that shows that people recover better in nature and natural landscapes and it is more relaxing. (There’s a great NPR Lifekit episode that talks about this).
The research also shows that there are three main factors that contribute to occupational recovery: relaxation, detaching from work, and controlling or making sure you’re doing the things that you want to do.
I’m going to leave it at that for this edition and finish up with the second half of our chat next time. I think these points are a good contrast to the next article that was in the New Yorker fairly recently.
After hearing from Jennica, tell me your ideal vacation and tell me how you want to feel when you come home from one. Also, do you check your work email or check in with your office on vacation?
Links
Kicking off with this grouch’s article and then moving UP from there. It is titled “The case against travel”. I have been hearing about this article all week and avoided it because I didn’t want to get angry. I listen to a podcast called The Sunday Scaries and their other podcast Retail Therapy every Sunday morning while I’m making and eating breakfast. I read the July 2 episode description and saw that the article was mentioned. I considered skipping the episode but listened anyway and then I started reading the article and I did get angry and had to stop reading and go back to it.
The two hosts of SS/RT called it the viewpoint of an elitist New Yorker and it turns out she is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, where she also earned one of her degrees. Her other alma mater is UC Berkeley. Her argument and references are out of left field, in my opinion. She questions why people travel and I’m dropping her quote here:
Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?
I think this woman needs to talk to Jennica. And why does everything need meaning? I personally don’t think everyone who goes on a vacation thinks their vacation is a virtuous or significant experience, Agnes. I think some people just want to go somewhere and see new things or eat different food or walk all over an entire city or lay on a beach and read books/magazines or they want to kayak or swim or climb mountains. Or, they just need to freaking rest! Can’t they just do those things without being judged? Agnes can get off her high horse, I bet she’s really fun at parties.
What are your thoughts? Grouchy Agnes seems to be lumping all travel into one category and the reasons for taking a tropical cruise, or taking an Alaskan cruise, visiting Tokyo, walking the Camino de Santiago, or following a band like Phish around on tour are vastly different, who is she to comment? Those are all travel. Reasons for doing them can be different and maybe the meaning is to see the world, to have a pilgrimage, to have an experience listening to your favourite band or to simply get out of town and not work and relax. Meaning can vary and is personal to the vacationer/traveller.
On to the fluffier or more fun links
How to clean your nasty suitcase. This man has covered the inside, the outside, and different types of suitcases. You know it’s dirty! Don’t put it on your bed. I almost bought new luggage recently because I can see how dirty my carry-on roller is on the outside and Monos was having a sale! But, I realized my carry-on just needs a major scrub (so do all of my backpacks) and I ordered some OxiClean instead. Everything is going to get a bath and I’ll report back after luggage spa day. I’m saving money and not sending something to the landfill!
Is wellness tourism sustainable tourism? I like the points that they’re making in that article.
Still wondering about the difference between a submarine and a submersible? Here you go, Afar explains. I still would not get in either of them. I am claustrophobic.
This bit of information or trivia is something I learned via my current job for a tour operator because one of our North Atlantic cruises visits these islands. Now it seems like a really great destination for a small yoga retreat. Hmmm.
I’ve never been a big drinker, even less so now than ever because it disrupts my sleep so much and like most of us, I don’t function well or happily without proper sleep. On my recent trip to Chile, I was happy with how many tasty mocktails the hotel bar had on the menu. I’m often happy with water, herbal tea, or a decaf coffee drink if I don’t want an alcoholic drink but still want something fun. But it’s nice to see that more restaurants and bars are following suit. I like that cruises are also jumping on this bandwagon. More mocktails for all!
Okay, that is all for this edition. I hope that you have something fun planned, or something meaningful planned, or that you’re just going to go to a hotel in a nearby city with a pool or a comfortable chair and read all of the books you want for 4 days and not think about work. You deserve any and all of those.
Thank you so much for subscribing, reading, clicking, and being awesome. Feel free to comment on vacation versus travel and I’ll see you for part two of my conversation with Jennica, and some of the articles she encountered in her research, for the end of July edition.
A reminder that there will be a third edition of the newsletter in August for paid subscribers. It will be a travel guide for Valparaíso, Chile and what makes it special.
Sonya