Vacations Blog

Until a few years back, a vacation meant piling the kids into the back and hitting the road. But times change, and now you have a whole new bunch of requirements to fulfill before you can even think about the beach, a cold beer and some peace and quiet.

Beach Vacation

If you don’t want your neighbors and colleagues to look down on you, follow this list of ’friendly’ things that your vacation has to be.

1. Environment-friendly:- It’s bad enough that your vacation destroys your entire year’s savings. Don’t let your vacation be blamed for the destruction of the earth. Find a destination which cares about their surroundings, get a green hotel, try to avoid trips by air and don’t do stuff which will be harmful to the environment – like wasting water, and leaving trash and beer cans in the outdoors or on the road.

2. Pet-friendly:- Not being a pet-friendly vacationer can bring eternal shame. Ask former MA Governor Mitt Romney, whose Presidential bid in 2008 got KO’ed because he strapped his dog Seamus to the roof of the car while on a family vacation trip from Boston to Ontario – a 12 hour trip.

Pet friendly vacation

Either treat your pets like family and let them mess up the back seat, or get a small cute dog like a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, which you can carry around in a bag. Stay at pet-friendly hotels.

3. Family-friendly:- Going to a destination/hotel/resort which isn’t family friendly is simply not acceptable. Absolutely no smoking, should offer room service, baby-sitting, cribs, rollaway beds and should have a convinience store either within the premises or just outside. Should be safe – as in no meth lab experts or other shady characters hanging around, and should have an on-call doctor 24 hours a day. There should be a separate kiddie pool. The family-friendly attractions should be across the road from the resort. In short – the entire hotel, their staff and the whole town should be at your disposal and beck and call throughout your stay.

4. Economy-friendly:- The primary purpose of taking a vacation – if you listen to all the financial experts yakking about the impact of tourism, is for you to do your patriotic duty and contribute to the economy. Depending on who you’re listening to – your vacation dollars need to end up in the grubby hands of either your own City Council, state legislators, or the robber-barons in Washington.

5.  Budget-friendly:- Ever heard of the AIG Effect? The summary of it is that you cannot spend your own money lavishly, because  those less fortunate are suffering. Admirable sentiment, but what’s anyone or anything else got to do with how you spend your own money?  But that’s how it is - if you don’t want people to frown on your excessive spending, then you have to limit your budget and vacation frugally. No limos, no helicopters, no private yachts and never, ever do any of this on a corporate expense account or company paid vacation.

Mumbai, India

6. Culture-friendly:- Until recently, it was quite ok to not know anything about your destination’s culture. You could drink alcohol on the beaches in Dubai, and take pictures of the slumdogs in Mumbai or the landmarks in London. That’s what a vacation is supposed to be, right? Not any longer.

Now, if you screw up and say or do something stupid, you’ll either end up in trouble with the law, be the subject of a discussion on ugly tourists on hundreds of blogs, or even worse – the star of a viral youtube video. So learn as much as you can about your destination and it’s people - the language, the food, the customs and most importantly – the laws.

7. Twitter-friendly:- You MUST send in at least one tweet/mile traveled for your vacation. Start with a tweet when you pull out of your driveway, a couple more on the way to the airport, lots of tweets from the airport about how boring it is, and even more on the plane with the  new airline wi-fi, at least one tweet when you land, and from thereon, you’re expected to tweet about anything and everything you see.

Oh, and once you’ve got all this right, don’t forget to enjoy your vacation.

Photo credits – Beach vacation – Justo Ruiz; Pet-friendly – SD Rebel; Mumbai – babasteve