BellaOnline Forums Travel and Culture Family Travel Would you consider a "staycation" vacation?

In talking with friends and family recently, I've noticed that almost all will be curbing any plans for travel for at least the next six months due to financial restraints.

I know it can be very expensive for families to travel even though the price of gas has come down. Some families I know are staying in town and visiting local places - hence the term "staycation".

I live in Atlanta and here we have the GA Aquarium, the World of Coke, and the CNN studio tours. As a local, I have not been to many of the cool places Atlanta has to offer. What about you? Would you consider a "staycation"?

Discount Disney World Vacation

I've considered it but we've never really done it. Unless you count taking a week off to paint the house as a vacation. I always have this fear that we'd just end up doing house projects- that would be the week the washing machine picks to give out or the faucets would all start leaking! I do like the idea though, when I was a kid all of our vacations were staycations. We'd go places less than 2 hours a way, come home to sleep and get up and do it again. It was a lot of fun.

Love Atlanta by the way, we visited last spring. The aquarium is fantastic!

City Breaks make great staycations - if you live near a city you can take the family every day to all those attractions,galleries and zoos you never have time for usually!

Also there is more in the budget for eating out and vacation spending money! We had fun in London as we had never thought of visiting London Zoo before.

Never done it but I do consider it a vacation...

We have a ton of free museums and monuments to see in the DC area. We live about 25 miles south. But to me a vacation really means not cooking and/or cleaning.
The kids and I went on a vacation with a friend and stayed at a time share with her family. She was all about the cooking 3 meals and laundry...etc...hecky no...we went out to eat, they stayed in and had sit down dinners. Not a bad thing, definitely commendable but that was not a vacation to me.

When I was a child, my parents couldn't afford to take trips with we three kids so we either went to visit relatives or took advantage of the attractions around St. Louis (where we lived).

Taking a big trip wasn't important. Spending that time with my family provides some of my best childhood memories.

Nice trip down memory lane just now!

Agree- the value of a vacation to us is that it is a break from the norm and many of the normal everyday stuff that distracts us from enjoying the kids (schedules, chores, errands, etc.)

To me there are 2 levels of vacation..
Level 1 If we're going away, no cooking - no cleaning
Level 2 something out of the norm on a day I would otherwise be at work, like spending a day at the museum or going to the zoo (both free here by the way). We haven't went away, away in 2 years but I've still taken vacation leave from work..and have done something close to home, even staying in a hotel and visiting flea markets.

As Kim said, most of my vacations when I was a kid were staycations. We called them "daytrips." Since I lived in Honolulu and then Anaheim CA, we had plenty of great daytrip venues!

We went to the beach most often but also drove to the aquarium, volcanoes, parks, zoos. In CA, we went horse-back riding in Apple Valley, picked cherries in Beaumont, eat sourdough bread in San Francisco.

But when I had my own kids and money was super tight, we couldn't even afford the extra gas for car rides. So, we pitched a tent in the backyard and camped out with flashlights. We made shadow puppets with our hands. We roasted marshmallows over the "fire" in our charcoal grill!

For kids, anything out of the ordinary is fun. For adults, we need a change of scenery! We were lucky enough to live near LA where there are lots of ethnic towns--China town, Little Tokyo, Olvera Street which is like a little Mexico. Museums and planetariums were great, too! We checked out nature trails and local arboretums. Big Bear and Arrowhead Lake were a short drive up the mountains while Palm Springs and San Diego were short drives in the opposite direction.

In Southern California, there are tons of fantastic nearby attractions, both man-made and natural.

And Paula, I agree! My kids' favorite memories include family visits. Just going to my mom or aunt's house was a fun day for the kids.

As for the adults, if a vacation means no cooking or cleaning...I guess I'd just stop cooking and cleaning for the weekend staycation! That would be hard, depending on the ages of your kids though!

For us a Staycation would be driving a few hours away to relatives and staying over and doing something fun in the city while we are there. We often have great "Day trips" where we do things locally or come to think of it we often go camping for the weekend which would be classed as a vacation of sorts. I guess that means we go on vacation once a month at least :) But to me, a true vacation would be one where we travel some way from home and take total time out from our normal lives. AND.... normally spend too much money ;)