Confessions of a Travel Junkie

Site of my next vacation - Costa Rica

{DCR News}

I want to confess to you all that I am a travel junkie...which is unfortunately an oxymoron in the US since we Americans get basically zero vacation time in comparison to other countries around the world - in my case, a measly 10 days (and 2 personal days woo!).

Let's look at the basic facts. In addition to a few national holidays, the average American gets two to three weeks off per year. But (and there is always a but), a recent poll from Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 57% of workers use all of their vacation days, compared with a 89% of workers in France. [CNN]

This concept BOGGLES my mind. Here are my facts. I get 12 vacation days and a handful of long weekends off from work. I'm going to use all those days to get to as many places as I possibly can. In 2011 alone, I have traveled already to New Zealand and just purchased a ticket to Costa Rica. Why? Because I have vacation time and I plan to use it.

To me, it's all about time budgeting. I'm lucky enough to live near my family so I don't need to take time off to fly anywhere for Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. But my family and I do sometimes go away for the holidays. In which case, we usually don't take time off to do so. Holiday weekends are perfect for traveling around the US, Canada or Mexico. Just this past Thanksgiving, my family and I went to Toronto for 4 days just to explore the city and do something different than sit at home and carve a turkey. Last Memorial Day weekend, my Dad and I took my sister to Nashville for her birthday.

We save the big vacations for taking time off work. My trip to New Zealand cost me 5 days of work, my trip to Costa Rica will be 4, and then I will take an odd day off here and there for weddings.

And at the end of the year, I will have zero (maybe even some negative) hours left to take off. But it will be worth it because I will have seen new parts of the world and taken days away from my desk. Because honestly it's not just about seeing the world and experiencing new things. It's about taking time away from the people, the office drama, the work piling up on your desk. It's about getting away for a while and not thinking about it. And everyone needs time to do that.

It is your right as an employee to take your time off. And even if it's just to sit at home and watch TV, I seriously get heated when I hear people say they have time rolling over to the next year because that means that they spent almost the entire year chained to their desk. And that's just not healthy.

WG1 actually sent me this article from CNN on why America is the "no-vacation nation". And it quoted John de Graaf, the national coordinator for Take Back Your Time, a group that researches the effects of overwork and he is quoted as saying, "There is simply no evidence that working people to death gives you a competitive advantage." Apparently the US came in 4th in the World Economic Forum's 2010-2011 rankings of the most competitive economies. 4th! We were outranked by Sweden - a country that offers workers 5 weeks of paid vacation!

This to me is proof enough that we need to take back control of our vacation by simply taking vacations where we don't need to answer the phone or check our email or be in touch with people at the office.

Either that, or move to Sweden.

What is Weisure?

When I have get-togethers at my faboosh apartment, me and my friends love to bring out Table Topics. It's a cube filled with cards with questions on them to start conversation. Questions vary from, "Which celebrity would you most like to see in person?" to "If you had the means how would you address the problem of homelessness?"

But my favorite question of all these questions is, "What historical time period would you most like to visit?" Most of the time I answer Victorian age mainly because I love their dresses (and also because I had the American Girl doll Samantha growing up and I loved her stories/bedroom accessories). But these days I really think I'd like to be transported to the 50's.

All this 50's mumbo jumbo came up while I was reading an article on CNN about this new phrase workers have coined called "weisure time". This phrase pertains to the new work-lifestyle in which the 9-to-5 workday has started to become non-existent. Meaning everyone works all the time and they add in fun/playtime to their workday instead of vice versa.

NYU sociologist Dalton Conley coined the phrase and commented to CNN that, "Increasingly, it's not clear what constitutes work and what constitutes fun." He goes on to say that the two are becoming ambiguous and that worlds that once had very distinct lines are now being blurred.

Which brings us back to the '50s, where Conley remarks that there were "certain rules" in business - that people didn't do business with friends and people kept their social lives very far away from their social spheres.

Sometimes I wished we still lived in that era - where there were distinct lines - a world where we didn't update our statuses from minute to minute on the Internet, and times where taking a vacation really meant taking a vacation.

These days we have personal computers, Blackberrys and iPhones attached to our hands, and social media allows us to easier interact with one another throughout the day to the point where there really is no excuse NOT to be in touch with work (even on the weekend). Conley says this is world that creative types (aka PR, marketing, advertising peeps) are already very much submerged in. They use social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to conduct work and they go to cocktail parties to do business. Conley thinks eventually everyone will become accustomed to this being the norm for all sectors of business and not just creative careers.

I'll admit that I'm guilty of mixing work and pleasure. Two years ago on Hoboken's St. Patrick's Day I fielded a multiple calls on a Saturday while I had over 20 people in my apartment drinking mimosas and playing Asshole because we had people at an off-site conference and I was the go-to girl for questions. Have I checked my email when I come home from work? Absolutely. Have I taken work home on a weekend? Definitely. And I mean come on people! I have a blog about work. If that isn't blurring the line of work and leisure then I don't know what is.

I committed the crime of combining work and pleasure. And it seems that our generation will blur the line even more as social media gets stronger and we start to combine work and play even more.

Sometimes I wish we still lived in the 50's, but then I remember that I would fail at making great cherry pies, I would probs have to quit my job after I got preggers, and I would really miss Twitter.

Which reminds me, follow us on Twitter (@workinggirlone & @workinggirltwo)! I love shameless plugs.