The vacation buffer

When should you add a vacation to your vacation?

Definitely legs (📍Santorini).

There’s nothing better than the anticipation before a big trip. You’re packing new gear for a new climate, imagining conversations with new people, and planning pilgrimages to the cultural touchstones your destination does best.

The only question is how you’re going to fit it all in. We Americans, for example, don’t take a lot of vacations — one study found that we average just 11 days off per year and are almost twice as likely as other countries to go a year without taking a vacation — so there’s an inherent pressure to make the most of our time off.

And this can lead to a packed itinerary. Three meals a day, sights before, after, and between, and ample use of the in-room Nespresso machine. To really compound the crunch, you’re probably leaving on a Friday after work and returning on a Sunday to minimize the workdays you’ll miss. The end result? Coming back to reality even more tired than where you left off.

Now I don’t usually claim to have the answers here, but as I write to you from the vacation from my vacation (back in Brooklyn but not back to work), I feel pretty good about giving two thumbs up to padding your reentry with a vacation buffer, even if it means less time away.

It’s the time you need to reacclimate to your home base, refill your empty fridge, and reflect on your trip. The sooner we rush back to reality, the more our time off can feel like a dream. To really do its job of relaxing our muscles and surgically removing our fingers from our keyboards, it needs to sink in like sunscreen.

Otherwise we rob ourselves of the true gift of getting out of town. The distance from reality is what allows us the space to refresh ourselves, to think without the limitations of logistics, to evaluate what we want to get back to and what we want to take a step back from. Without that space, can you really get away?