It is Vacation Season.
Let's appreciate the many forms our summer trips can take.
We are trapped in the unrelenting thralls of inflation, so reading articles like “Top 10 Ways to Save Money” feels uncanny, unconvincing, and also somehow inevitable. The faintly get-a-load-of-these-financial-sinners tone of the writing feels like it is building toward something revelatory, but these pieces ultimately will offer buy an espresso machine instead of getting Starbucks everyday-tier advice, or they will have the unmitigated gall and temerity to implore people to not go on all-inclusive vacations four times a year. Being the financial savant that I am, I will heed these money management hacks and opt to buy the cheap one-ply toilet paper for the maid’s room in my fictitious 8,000 square-foot mansion that I will never afford because I Doordash McDonald’s occasionally and like to go to Europe.
Vacation season is upon us, and my girlfriend’s bestie just announced that she will partake in a solo two-week pilgrimage across the coast of Portugal. While this may sound like an unforgettable and culturally enriching experience, I will hold forth windily on one of my more arbitrary ideological positions: The only cool solo vacation is going to Reno and playing poker and doing blow for 36 hours straight. There will also be parents embarking on wholesome family trips with their five-year-old spaz, and there is no doubt that the Apple Vision Pro will be fantastic at keeping their kids quiet in the back of the car better than an iPad ever could. As an enlightened millennial, I will instead be playing my Game Boy at the Grand Canyon—as God intended.
It is tempting, and not entirely incorrect, to sum up many vacations as the culmination of ironclad or improvisational itineraries, frantic Air Bnb bookings, and annoying obligatory touristy stuff captured in an Instagram album that lends an aurora of profundity to some basic shit. But there is more going on with a vacation than this, and at the very least, there are five tiers of trips that will happen this summer either voluntarily or against every fiber of your being.
The day trip
Either planned several weeks in advance or a spontaneous burst toward something exciting, the whimsical nature of these excursions has the potential to become straining in uncharacteristic ways or bottom out into complete dysfunction.
“Hey babe, let’s drive to the beach in Plymouth because Cape Cod is too far.”
Smash cut to a borderline relationship-ending fight with your significant other while you’re trapped in six hours of traffic.
The hometown trip
A low-key stay in the hometown to see the family will invite a relentless accumulation of fond memories and nostalgia. It’s wholesome and nice, but this trip won’t do much damage to the camera roll—no one wants to see photos of the vistas from your childhood bedroom.
You’ll post a single update of this trip to your Instagram stories, which somehow prompts your online busybody aunt to spam your Facebook Messenger that you haven’t checked since at least 2019. With manic passivity, she unleashes 17 consecutive messages, 16 of which are decades-old family photos that are only semi-related to what you just posted, and a coyly snuck-in article about how C.C. DeVille, the guitarist from Poison, is the illegitimate son of Anthony Fauci.
The friend group trip
These always start out with good intentions—booking a cottage on the lake with a hot tub—and they abruptly develop into a military operation. There are 17 Google Doodles, someone always throws a temper-tantrum, there are only five beds for seven people, and there is someone who forgets to pick up grapes during the one daily trip to the grocery store and now there aren’t any grapes for the charcuterie board and no one wants to eat sweaty room-temperature fancy cold cuts and cheese without any fucking grapes.
I have witnessed friend group empires crumble because someone was stiffed $10 on Splitwise after they bought the group a pack of High Noons and because someone’s girlfriend couldn’t figure out how to use a rental car.
The wedding trip
There are things in life that I mentally identify as “none of my business,” and wedding season is very much one of those. However, after years of various friendships drifting away towards long-distance maintenance, in an abstract way, I admire the ability to make distinct plans to travel to another city to attend the wedding of a friend and some person you met a handful of times.
If there is a wedding in a city you’ve never been to, maybe you and your partner will decide to stay a few days after the ceremony to explore. This is the kiss of death.
On your flight back you’ll say, “At least we can check the suburbs of Houston off the bucket list. I never thought we’d see so much strip malls and despair.”
The big trip
There are kinder ways to sum up these legendary and sometimes authentically life-changing weeks- or even months-long international voyages, but a less kind one is that you and your friends somehow weathered a series of embarrassing and irresponsible acts of idiocy that comes with a bottle of Absynth and a Friday night in Berlin.
The obsessives who plan these trips are very valuable because they will spend several weeks concocting a plan that is a decent mix of touristy stuff, hipstery off-beat this is what the locals do according to Yelp excursions, and just enough wiggle room in the early afternoons for planned spontaneity.
Everyone involved will panic a few days before and impulse-purchase at least two quality button-down shirts from Zara because you will be on camera and this is your one chance to post a few dope albums on Instagram. Pro tip: Go to Zara at your destination so the shirts don’t get wrinkled during the 10-hour flight to Barcelona.
Never again: friend group trips.