If Money Were Not a Factor, Where Would Your Next Vacation Be?

cinqueterreOver the weekend I had a nice long chat with a friend about vacations. A long time ago, she identified a personal need/desire to take one vacation each year. She’s traveled around the world and experienced lots of different places, but for these vacations, she specifically likes to go to someplace exotic and relax for a week.

I made a personal goal a long time ago to do something similar: Once a year, I wanted to go somewhere I had never been. When I travel, I like to go to one specific place and get to know it at a leisurely pace. I also like to eat a lot of local cuisine.

However, over the last few years (it is no coincidence that timeframe coincides with me running my company as a full-time job), my vacations haven’t exactly been exotic. Nor have they really even been relaxing. I went to the beach for a week-long family reunion two summers ago, and I visited Virginia for a week at Christmas for both of the last two years.

In fact, looking back at my blog, the last real vacation I took was to Ireland in 2011. I could be forgetting something, but that’s the last record of a vacation I have on file.

Anyway, all of this has me thinking about vacations and the possibility of taking another real one sometime before I’m 40.

So if money weren’t a factor, where would you go on a week-long vacation? It doesn’t have to be a journey to another country. You could rent a cabin in the woods for a week by yourself or with a dozen of your favorite people. You could go on a whirlwind tour of an entire region, or you can relax and be pampered at a resort.

The trickiest thing I’ve found is that I want to come back from a vacation feeling more relaxed than before the vacation, but I come back to thousands of e-mails, so the very act of vacationing results in a less relaxing return.

Where would you go?

9 thoughts on “If Money Were Not a Factor, Where Would Your Next Vacation Be?”

  1. I would like to go on a cruise. I don’t much care where it goes, although I would prefer warmer climes so I could enjoy standing at the rail of the ship and admire the open sea without freezing.

    Come to think of it, maybe it’s not a cruise I want so much as a privately chartered luxury yacht. 😉

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  2. Hire an assistant to deal with the emails, or get Alan to do it. Really. You have ambassadors; surely one or two could be trusted to deal with the mundane things, that Alan needed help with. Consider it the “oxygen mask” theory – ‘if you’re traveling with small children or others who need assistance, put your own mask on before assisting them’ – you’re no good to the people who need you if you’re passed out from the lack of oxygen to your brain. (I apply this theory liberally to parenting. and insist on recharging my own batteries periodically, or I am just horrible to everyone).

    Anyway, I have a loooooong list. I’m not including places I’ve been and want to return to, including rural interior southern France, the UK, and Taiwan. Only a week, though? That’s truly not long enough. It takes three weeks to shuck the harness and really RELAX, to make some local friends, to learn how to ask for the local food specialty in their language, and so on. One week, and you are still just a tourist!
    1. New Zealand
    2. Japan
    3. Galapagos
    4. Malta
    5. Alaska
    6. Baja California, when the baby whales are being born
    7. Mexico
    8. Norway or somewhere else specifically for Northern Lights photography
    9. India (there goes two months!)
    10. Poland
    11. Cape Cod (cheating, I’ve been there many times)
    12. Boston (been there)
    13. BGG.CON not as a Team Geek member (not gonna happen)
    14. Cruise to the Caribbean (again)
    15. Colombia
    16. Peru
    17. Brazil
    18. France (been there)
    19. southern Taiwan (been to the country, but not to the south)
    20. Railroad trip across Canada (and several other countries, including the Orient Express)

    You get the idea. My list pretty much has no end. If I had bottomless money, I’d have a home to come back to, but I’d be out of it probably 30 weeks a year once the kids are in college or on their own.

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  3. My wife and I are incredibly blessed to work for a company that pays for each of us to take a 4-week vacation with a guest every 5 or so years, as long as we go somewhere we’ve never been. We schedule our trips about 2 years apart, so I’ve been fortunate to get to see a lot of great places in the 11 years we’ve both worked here. The unintended consequence is that I haven’t done any travel closer to home in that time.

    Right now, the top of our list is Cuba. It’s getting easier to travel there, and we really want to see Cuba before international tourism changes it into Cancun.
    Aside from that, if travel time, jet lag, and money aren’t an object I would go somewhere like the Seychelles, or Rarotonga, or some other small island nation. The culture of small, close societies is really interesting.
    Number 3 on the list would be a short visit to Antarctica (This one probably isn’t on my wife’s list.). I’ve been to every other continent, so it seems fitting to cross Antarctica off the list as well.

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  4. I agree with Julia that the toughest part about this is the one week limitation. I know you and I talked about whether you could get to a point where you could spend a max of about 3-4 hours/day working (minimum maintenance with help from others) and spend the rest of the day really immersing yourself in an area (thereby allowing you to be away for a few weeks). Some of the places on Julia’s list (like New Zealand) are not one week places, but they’re amazing and need to be on a travel list anyway. The other consideration for you personally might be how much transit you’re willing to do in the location you visit. Using New Zealand again–it’s probably the greatest place I’ve ever visited, but much of the time there is spent on journeying from place to place (which is beautiful). You just have to be willing to accept that you’ll be in a car/bus/train for a lot of the trip if you really want to experience the country in only 3-4 weeks.

    If I were to limit myself to exactly one week, I’d go one of two routes–plop down in a city, probably Paris right now–or I’d explore the wilderness. I did an amazing long weekend that could easily have been a week in Southern Utah/Northern Arizona a few years back. It included hiking Bryce Canyon, driving to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, hiking down into the canyon, then driving up to Zion National Park and hiking there. I camped in each location, and it was a trip I’d do again in a heartbeat. The drives were beautiful and the hiking was serene.

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  5. Thank you all for sharing your destinations! Lots of varied ideas here. I think it might be indicative of my perspective on vacations that a 1-week vacation is the longest vacation I can possibly imagine, but I shouldn’t have limited you all to the same thing! 🙂

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  6. Come to Asheville, NC! You will be welcomed to play Viticulture/Tuscany (or any game from our collection) with our Saturday Evening Gaming Group! We have a guest room! Dog and 3 cats included.

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    • Thanks Dee! I’ve heard wonderful things about Asheville. Now that I know there are cats there, it’s moved even higher on the list. 🙂

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  7. For me, it’s Japan and Europe. I’ll spend two weeks in Japan and a month in Europe. There’s a group tour of Europe that I have been eyeing forever. And maybe Malaysia. They have also food there.

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  8. There are so many place I’d like to visit; some that I’ve never been to and some that I love and want to go back to.

    However, if I had to pick ONE place to go right now I would go on a tour around Canada. Vancouver is the city at the top of my “must see” list, and I loved Toronto when I had the chance to go several years ago (I also really want to visit Snakes and Lattes!)

    I also have lots of friends in various parts of Canada, so this would be an amazing way to reconnect with them.

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