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We’ve just taken a vacation that’s become a midwinter tradition. We had a wonderful time, and afterward, as always, we were refreshed, relaxed, and reinvigorated, not least because we had no fatigue from a long car trip, worries about bad weather, road conditions, or flight delays. In fact, we never even left our house.
The idea of a vacation at home came to us several years ago. We’d planned a long weekend in Chicago, but the week before, the concert that had been the trip’s impetus was canceled because the headliner had emergency surgery. Our first impulse was to go on ahead to Chicago, but as we talked it became less appealing. The holiday hustle and bustle had just faded; maybe a relaxing weekend at a cozy lakeside Wisconsin or Michigan bed & breakfast with a bagful of books to enjoy in front of a roaring fire would be better. We called a couple places we’d enjoyed in the past, but they were booked. Should we keep looking, we wondered, or just forget it altogether? My husband, Peter, had scheduled the Friday out of his office but always has paperwork waiting. I don’t remember who had the idea of vacationing at home, but we both immediately knew that it was right. After all, we were willing to drive a fairly long distance and spend a fair amount of money at one of those B&Bs, but we’d spent thousands of hours and more money than we like to contemplate fixing up our old farmhouse to be warmly cozy, complete with a fireplace for those roaring fires. Why not enjoy it? We decided that we’d stay home but that it wouldn’t be a normal weekend: We’d make it a real vacation. It might seem as if a home vacation shouldn’t be a big deal, but the truth is that Peter and I, like most people these harried and hurried days, rarely take time to savor the home we’ve spent all that time and money creating. More often than not it’s a nice backdrop to a host of activities, some pleasurable but most just the have-to’s of modern life. Vacationing at home, we’ve found, doesn’t require much effort, but it does require some planning. Surprisingly, the biggest effort — the hardest thing, especially the first time — was not giving in to guilty feelings that we should be doing something, not just lazing around. We kept reminding ourselves that if we went away on vacation we wouldn’t be feeling guilty. Our kids were grown by then, but I’d think that, depending their ages and level of cooperation, it would be possible to vacation at home with children, especially in midwinter, when there are fewer activities. Planning is crucial if you’d like to have a successful home vacation. Here’s a checklist we’ve come up with over the years: • Decide which time(s) of year work best for you. Midwinter’s our favorite. Summer hasn’t been as successful for us, but I know a Lake Springfield family whose members take an annual week-long vacation at home in the summer, enjoying their boat and lazing around the pool. • Make sure the house is reasonably clean and tidy. Nothing makes those nagging guilty feelings shout louder and renders them harder to resist than piles of dirty laundry and dishes or floors that need cleaning. Minor repairs need doing? Plan on getting them done ahead of time, or promise yourself they’ll be taken care of afterward. • Make a rough plan. It shouldn’t be a tight schedule — that’d defeat the purpose — just a concept of how the vacation will play out. The plan should be made jointly and the activities should be ones you both enjoy. What will you do? Reading, hiking, cards or games, watching movies, or even working on a creative project together. Will you stay in the entire time, as we do, or go out to for some meals or to movies? Once you’ve decided, be sure to get necessary items in advance. Nothing is a bigger spoiler of a home vacation than having to fight through Saturday shopping crowds.
• Meal planning is one of the most important parts of a successful vacation at home; for several reasons the more specific you are here, the better. Peter and I both like to cook, and we like to cook together — in fact, it’s something we’ve done as a couple since our first dates. Cooking together is an integral part of our vacations at home, but our rule here is that the preparations must be simple and, most important, mustn’t create huge messes. On other occasions we’ll enjoy collaborating on an elaborate meal like the Asian menu we recently made that took three entire days to prepare (we finally sat down to eat late Sunday night) and literally used every pot and pan we have — and we have a lot of pots and pans. We had fun, but preparing it and cleaning up the resultant mess was far from relaxing. For our home-vacation meals we try to make some elements ahead and keep last-minute prep and cleanup to a minimum. Write down your menus, make a shopping list, and be sure you have everything you need before your vacation begins. Breakfast might be an omelette, or we might prebuy and freeze some of the fabulous croissants and breakfast pastries from Incredibly Delicious (the staff will be happy to tell you the best way to reheat them). Lunch might be a soup, such as French onion, that we’d frozen earlier in the year, or sandwiches made with special ingredients. Dinner can be as simple and luxurious as a good steak, baked potato, and salad — easy even if you don’t like to cook. Or how about lobsters — both Schnucks and Meijer will steam them perfectly so that all you have to do is warm them — or king-crab legs. Melt a little garlic butter, and you have a feast. If you don’t want to cook at all, consider ordering carryout. Even upscale restaurants not normally associated with carryout are happy to prepare a meal you can take home.
• Splurge a little. With the money we’ve saved on transportation and hotel, we always indulge in some luxury foods not in our normal budget. Prime dry-aged steaks, shell oysters and other seafood from the Gulf of Mexico, fresh wild mushrooms from the Pacific Northwest, and caviar are some of the things we’ve mail-ordered for various home vacations. We also stock wines that are usually only for special occasions, always including at least one bottle of Amarone, a rich, warming red that just begs to be sipped in front of that roaring fire.
Once our pantry and wine cellar have been stocked, the house is clean and advance preparations have been made, firewood is stacked and ready, and books, magazines, and DVDs lie waiting, we’re ready to slip into something comfortable, sit back, relax, and enjoy our home — and each other.
Contact Julianne Glatz at realcuisine@insightbb.com.
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2008.
