Staycation

is the new buzz word - meaning staying at home during the summer, in the face of expensive trips and, again, crowded skies.

But I cannot help thinking of the ones who work in the tourist attraction, especially in smaller states. This is how they make their living. It used to be that high school and college students would work in these places during their summer breaks, but, apparently, not much these days.

"Hey, at least you got fired in the summer"

And really, when I think about it, that was the first summer I had off in 16 years. Before that it was constant jobs.

Still, the whole "not-getting-anything-but-a-measly-$400/wk-from-UI" thing kind of sucked when I had looming bills.

And the asshole who fired me now works in the IT department of my current job. :mad:

Going through several layoffs: when we had the time we did not have the money to travel. When we had the money, we did not have adequate vacation time.

Still, during at least the first few weeks, we did take advantage of mid week low rate and low crowds to visit at least some local attractions.

If I stay home vs travel somewhere for vacation all I do is work. If not working as part of my job, I am working on projects around the house.
Repair this, fix that, redo this room or landscape the back yard.

When I have a staycation as they are calling it, I return to work more exhausted than if I travel and my return flight doesn't get in until Midnight the night before I return to work.

When my kids were small and my paycheck even smaller, we always found something close-to-home for a vacation. Being near a major city helped, but also it gave us a greater appreciation of where we live.

Yes, this will hurt some major tourist destinations. Recently I spoke with a friend who is involved with crusies and Carribbean vacations...she's expecting the worse. She jokes that the youngest people she sees making plans these days is 60.

There will be resorts and local attractions that will benefit. I do a good amount of traveling, but it's not the price of oil that is keeping me closer to home, but the hassles that traveling have become. Airfares are going up...as are surcharges you don't find out about until after the bill arrives...then the fun of dealing with TSA and the delays and poor customer service. I'd rather drive or take a train.

Inversely, with the cheaper dollar, foreign tourists will find great bargains here. Learning Japanese, German and Chinese might not be a bad thing...

often don't GO there because of all the outsiders who book up all the rooms & venues.. Everywhere is "close" for some people, so maybe more locals will fill the gaps:)

My son and his brand new wife (May 24) are helping the travel economy..

Rome, Florence, Naples, Genoa, Venice and then a 2 week Greek cruise..with a London stopover on the way back home :)

Of course, they are helping the travel economy in Europe...

Last fall we were thinking of going to Venice this spring, but once the dollar started its steep decline we decided to postpone.

We were in SoCal last week, instead, enjoyed the trip to Catalina but wilted at 94 degrees in Laguna Beach, without even a breeze...

and threatened rain, but thank goodness..it did not rain :)

The local mall sold two sweaters to my daughter-in-law from Concord, CA who only brought summery stuff :)

edited to add pics of my brand new daughter:loveya:

these are from their engagement pics

Usually I spend too much money on fireworks, travel too far, and go to those big fireworks shows.

But the shows have been getting worse year after year. Gas is too much.

So I think I'm going to just spend the whole day in my back yard. I figure I'll fire up the grill around 8 or nine in the morning, use it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I'll have a comfy chair, a bottle of wine, and a trashy Stephen King novel.

Tell me that's not a good way to spend a holiday.

i'll be taking them to Monterey ans SF for overnighters, so even though i won't be leaving the state it will still be a vacation for me. I also went to Europe for 2 weeks at the end of MArch, beginning of April so i'm not complaining, that will probably be our last go away vacation for a long time.

We will be driving approximately 335 miles up the southern California coast to Monterey. Assuming gas will be $4.50/gallon, and assuming that I will get 34 MPG average on the trip (both conservative estimates) I will pay $45.00 each way. That beats air fare and train fare for the family transportation costs. My credit card has a sort of rebate program based on usage and with that I got a bigger discount on our lodging than I could have gotten with our usual AAA discount. We will be watching for restaurant specials and such as much as we can (not easy, because I avoid chains and prefer local-owned restaurants). We won't be doing a lot of things that cost money, except for the aquarium. Just gonna hang out and enjoy the natural beauty of this wonderful area.

Anyways, if we didn't have the $90 for gas, we would just go to Ventura for a long weekend. Vacations can still be had if one plans with an eye toward frugality, and if one has paid vacation time. There are a lot of folks who have neither money nor paid time off this season, more than last year I am sure.

Of course, traveling along the coast of California always is... as long as you have fast reaction time and good breaks when idiot drivers trying to pass someone at the winding Hwy 1 are coming at you (happened to us two years ago on the way to Mendocino.).

This is the first time I can ever recall seeing that.

Another lengthy, boring essay in which the author hints at his evacuation strategy and launches another "fuck you" screed at the Bushies and Amerika v2.0, a particularly vicious version of corporatist hell that would have given even Hieronymus Bosch nightmares. Read at your own risk. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery for an hour after reading.


It's been a sanity-saving option for some time go on vacation to an unnamed smallish country south of the Rio Grande and just prolong my "staycation" for an indefinite period of time, melting into the countryside and inflicting myself on a few expats I know down there who've already evacuated this fascist shit hole. My Spanish sucks, but there's nothing like total immersion for quick improvement. I'm getting closer to exercising that option with every rattle of the vice presidential saber and every new section of security state prison wall the bastards pound into place.

These expats tell me they actually feel freedom in ways so subtle that they weren't missed until they were restored. And they're shocked that they had no idea how oppressive life in the US had become once it turned into a haven for the toxic reactionary redneck assholes who canonized St. Raygun, waited for a worthy successor and found Bushism to be an evolutionary step.

They say they're blown away at being able to live lives of peace and joy and renewed optimism -- are in fact encouraged by the dominant culture to do so. And these aren't the kinds of pollyannas you'd expect to say seemingly goofy stuff like that.

In fact, if you were a loud-mouthed reactionary treating the entire establishment to your medieval world view, they're among the most disagreeable and pissed off people you'd ever want to meet. Nor are they particularly concerned about the karmic or legal consequences of beating the living shit out of pricks like that. We get along great.

Peace and joy and optimism only sound goofy because in the process of becoming acculturated as frenzied Americans we forget that they're descriptive of a state of mind and spirit that used to be the hallmarks of a functional, actualized human being.

That's completely unacceptable here in the world champ of rapacious, destructive capitalism where fear, uncertainty and doubt are manufactured to keep us on edge and in a constant race against some horrific vision of total failure -- defined by America, of course, as lacking lots of money and expensive toys.

Success, on the other hand, means continuous hyper-consumption of trash nobody sane could possibly want or need. Like little made-in-China-by-slaves flag lapel pins colored with lead paint, made to order for phony patriots who would rather fight and die by proxy, as well as those idiot chowder heads who can't or won't separate symbolism from substance. These fools seem to think a hand held over a heart while listening to a lousy song while waiting for the ball game to start is much more patriotic than trying to deliver baseline health care to everyone.

A while back -- certainly by the end of WW II, maybe much earlier -- America's rulers decided for all of us that wage and debt slavery defined the approved approach to life in the corporate cesspool. And this death trap for the human mind and spirit consists mainly of boring, shitty paying jobs, a tragic joke of a medical system and a truly impressive set of social control mechanisms to keep the peasants away from the throats of the elite on their own volition.

It features a public education system that doesn't educate, declining literacy rates, a giant and growing under class that, when the ICE-men run out of immigrants to fuck with, will be the first to experience the cattle cars and the KBR/Halliburton camps. Or maybe not. The camps are there and ready, according to numerous eye-witness accounts, photographs and even a little video footage.

Whether they'll be used for average white people is another matter. I know who they won't be used for, though. I can't see where members of the Army of God or Aryan Nations or the KKK are going to be anywhere near those camps -- except possibly as privatized, outsourced and well-paid torturers. Neither is the "anthrax killer" or one of the "pro-life murderers" who shoot ob/gyns for caring more about live women than about the twisted way fundie nuts interpret a book of dead or irrelevant scripture.

Then there's that vague, free-floating feeling of purposelessness and a life lived unsatisfactorily to drive everybody crazy who isn't already insane. A sense that there must be something besides commuting and traffic reports and cube farms and corporate culture and the constant layoffs and off-shoring and the brutality of a zero sum economy that punishes the poor for their poverty and rewards the rich simply for being rich. All this and the systematic dismantling of a once proud and progressive country thrown into the deal for the hell of it.

Some Americans even dare to consider that maybe there should be enough time for music and laughter and reading and playing and watching kids go nuts and hanging out with the cats, thinking about unimportant but interesting things, occasional erotic afternoons with flirtatious spouses and, christ help us all, the ultimate anti-American activity: doing absolutely fucking nothing for as long as it feels good.

When people started answering questions like "how you doing?" by proudly proclaiming how busy they were, I figured the deaths of shared experience and group consciousness were at hand -- replaced by some weird republican version of "personal responsibility," and endorsed by an entire political movement composed of the most irresponsible group of me-firsters to infest this country since Columbus ran into Hispaniola and took a right.

There's a good reason anti-depressants are the biggest sellers among the vast array of pharmacopeia available at any neighborhood drug store. The reason is called America and the cure is revolution or evacuation.

Compliance and subservience would probably work too, but then I have to look myself in the eye now and then while shaving and I need to be OK with what I see looking back.


wp

Twenty years ago, when laptop just started, I wanted both of us to go on vacation with no phones and no emails and concluded the place to be the center of the ocean. Not exactly, but we did go on a cruise.

Now, forget it. You get a personal cell phone from your employer and you are expected to be "on call." Or, at least, you know that you'd better check your email if you don't want to be floored by the time you go back to the office.

And we got into a vicious cycle where we expect to have everything available for us "24/7" and to be available just the same. One reason, of course, is the layoff of so many employees, so that the ones left behind are expected to pick up the slack.