Notes from a Staycation
It went about as well as you thought a staycation would go. We ended up taking care of things. The first day, I got three hours of alone time (the first since April!) and then discovered my car battery died and needed to be replaced. We discovered Josh’s phone wasn’t charging and needed to be replaced. I dropped an entire bowl of waffle batter on the floor, and it sprayed everywhere in the kitchen. I spent a lot of time desperate to tune out and read a book, but unable to find a silent spot. I checked in on work things every day. I cooked. I cleaned.
We also managed to get to the beach for the day. We peed as many times as we could before we left the house, drove to the nearest beach town, parked in a random lot and bypassed the boardwalk by walking through a neighbourhood. People kept their distance on the sand, leaving about 12 feet around each set of chairs. We wore our masks whenever we stood up to walk to the water’s edge. We had five hours on the sand.
It was lovely. And it was scary. I couldn’t fully enjoy it because I felt so overwhelmed being around people, even though everyone kept a respectful distance. (But what if they didn’t? I needed to be alert and watchful.) I kept waiting for something to go wrong. When it didn’t go wrong, I was relieved but also exhausted from worrying. It was a wonderful treat, and it was completely depressing at the same time.
I’m not sure it’s possible to take a true staycation right now; not if we’re cautious and therefore still need to take care of all the day-to-day things such as cooking. But it’s also because we’re at home, there’s no reason not to take care of things. Meaning, if we were away, we would have dealt with the dead battery or phone at another point. But we weren’t away, so we dealt with them in the moment.
I guess I’m ending the staycation feeling like it was a weekend more than it was a true break. Which is… fine. I mean, we’re enormously lucky to still be working, and I love what I do. Our kids are semi-self-sufficient. We’re healthy. Maybe it’s just a reminder that I need to do a better job setting firm limits and carving out downtime for myself. Or maybe I’m just better being ensconced in work than I am not doing things when I’m in the house.
We’re nearing six months into the pandemic, and it’s not going away any time soon. I either need to do better about holding time sacred, or I need to just admit that breaks aren’t completely helpful for me right now.
7 comments
I have a ton of vacation time to use – probably 4 weeks – and I have no where to go. Maybe I’ll take December off. Just feels kind of pointless…
I’m glad you got a beach day!
I will say, though, that in the midst of a staycation, dealing with a dead battery feels more like a minor annoyance than a stressful event that must be dealt with immediately. (For me, anyway.) If you have nowhere to be, you can take your time and find the best deal etc…
My car battery died too! I get it – it’s rarely being used, only doing grocery pick ups, but READ THE ROOM, car. This is not the time. And I get your beach feelings exactly. We have been lucky enough to get to the beach almost weekly (we have a couple very close lake front beaches) and have never had a real issue with people getting too close but the anxiety of it all. The constant vigilance. It is exhausting beyond exhausting, even while we are enjoying ourselves. I’m glad you got to go, though. Small moments of joy are still joy.
We staycationed for a week back in July and it was exactly as you have described. Kind of like a weekend and not particularly special. We even tried to make it ‘special’ with certain things (weekday takeout! hikes at local parks! making homemade ice cream!) but honestly I checked my email and just hung out at home and it didn’t really feel very special (I hike on Saturdays! We do takeout once a week!). And I was actually mildly annoyed that I showed back up to work on Monday and just had a bunch of backlogged stuff to deal with (I hung out at home for a week so I could get behind at work? Lovely). All that said, the whole time I was like “don’t be a shitty person – you have a job with paid vacation. You should be grateful.” lol
With the exception of this past weekend, my last two weekends have been long weekends and we have “stayed” in the sense that we travelled but stayed within the STate of NH or really close to it. We went to the beach in Maine, ziplining in Mass and camping in the White Mountains and I was very happy about that. I discovered that I actually love tenting. <3
The most traumatising part of your post for me? The waffle batter all over the floor! lol But yes, I can also imagine how scary it was at the beach. We’re supposed to be social distancing at the moment, but most people are not doing it very well. We’re all very complacent – no cases in our city since April. (Though we went out to dinner and movies with friends, and the restaurant had spaced out their tables, and the movie was far from full.) Still, we got away for the weekend to a small wine village an hour or so away, and it was SOOOO nice to get out of the city, to drive through country fields, to see the big sky at night.
I don’t think I could staycation at home. I noticed a local hotel was offering staycation deals – now that I could handle, but it seems silly to stay in a hotel when the city is only 10 minutes away!
Lol, Mali.
I, too, was so happy to hear you got sometime in the sand.
I think it’s understandable that relaxing might be difficult when there is so much to stress about — car battery, phone battery, oh yeah and that little thing called a pandemic.
I also think you’re right about holding SOME time sacred. Maybe not a whole staycation, but some sort of refreshing time peppered into the weeks and months.
Okay, this had me giggling: “we peed as many times as we could before we left the house” — that is 100% my strategy! No peeing anywhere else! I have peed at school but had the unfortunate experience of discovering that it wasn’t close enough to school opening for there to be toilet paper in ANY of the stalls, apparently. 🙁
Staycations are hard for the whole thing that you are actually home, and there’s no one cleaning up after you or cooking for you and you can see the dust bunnies under the furniture and all the things that have to be done are haunting you so much more closely than when you actually GO AWAY.
Holding some downtime sacred though, that’s super important. (I suck at it too.) I feel like existing is so stressful, and everything is amplified. So making sure to read and kick the feet up on the couch and watch something silly is a way to get a miniminimini vacation.