Vacations: Part Two

Vacations are all about leaving the familiar behind and going someplace new. And that’s great. It’s fun to get out of your routine and head for new horizons. If you’re traveling alone, you have total say in where you’re going to go for vacation. If you’re traveling with family, you have to negotiate a place to go with your spouse and children. But, however you do it, try to go to someplace truly new. Writers need to go to new places, need to experience new stimuli, need to see things through different eyes than the ones that travel the same route to work each day to spend each day in the same office with the same people.

If you head to Disneyworld every year, you won’t have this injection-of-the-new that, as a writer, should be your drug of choice. Once you’ve been to Disneyland—or wherever—and experienced it, it enters your consciousness and becomes part of the ‘familiar’ to you. And the proof is that when you go back the next year you’ll immediately make a beeline for the places you liked best from last year.

And if you head to the beach each year, you’ll go to the same hot dog stands, the same man for the kids’ cotton candy…you’ll lay on the same beach and get the same tan. It might be relaxing, but it will be little more.

We all love the familiar and venturing to a new place with the only two weeks you get off each year can be risky. But what’s the alternative? Safe choices? Writers are rarely made by making the safe choice.

So think about it. Maybe you should start by examining your personal vacation history. Do you normally go to places with theme parks? Then don’t do that this year—any other destination will be a change. Do you normally go camping? Change it up and take an urban vacation. If you live in Colorado and normally go camping somewhere in the state, instead visit Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs. You can camp outside the cities if you need to save money, but spend your time IN each city, exploring each city and what it has to offer. Eat different kinds of food, go to museums, go to the movies and take in a foreign film. Watch people in this urban setting. And hey, you’re in Colorado, if you can time your vacation to coincide with a film festival—Telluride is great, for example—you might even make a connection in addition to watching some different sorts of films that you wouldn’t see outside the festival circuit.

And what about the big trip—getting out of the country. If you live in the U.S. and have only ever traveled in the U.S. you need to get out. Go to Europe. Pick a country you’ve always dreamed about going to and do it. A plane ticket from New York to London is about the same price as a ticket from New York to L.A…. You can take trains in Europe—they get you from place to place quickly, and you get to SEE Europe go by out your window. Think of the stories you could imagine with all those new stimuli!

The point is to open your eyes to the new. And you’ll never see the new if you don’t travel someplace new.

Copyright © Diane Lake

23Jul17

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com