A week has always been our default vacation length. Vacation rentals and other places seem to encourage it, and it is really easy.
One week: The typical vacation length
- Pros: Easy to schedule, long enough to get a mental break
- Cons: Not quite long enough?
Resorts often will reinforce the week-long idea, trying to book most of their arrivals and departures on the weekends and discouraging mid-week arrivals. For several years, the Tyler Place was our little bit of heaven on earth. In their eighty years of hosting family camp, they had discovered that week-long stays were exactly what they preferred. As a result, they won’t book anyone for longer than that!
All the guests arrive on Saturday after lunch, and we all depart shortly after breakfast the following Saturday. Having the uniform schedule gives the entire resort and all the guests the same rhythm. We all looked forward to Saturday’s mixer, meeting the other guests, and we all loved Friday night’s dance party, a mix of Kellerman’s (remember the movie Dirty Dancing?) and the very best college band parties.
Any other vacation length would have detracted from that intense camaraderie, and therefore from the whole vacation. We loved our week in the Vermont woods! But some families would tack on a few days in southern Vermont, or New Hampshire, and one family even took a week to drive. We always thought that sounded like fun, but couldn’t see our way to taking more than a week of vacation.
That is, we couldn’t see it until one year, a house that we had rented in the past had an extra weekend available, so we took it, making a week vacation into ten days. And so we discovered…