Mas Tequila
I took the family to an All-Inclusive. It wasn’t a great All-Inclusive. It was the RIU Tequila in Playa Del Carmen Mexico. The Tequila is part of a compound of RIU resorts all next to each other. It wasn’t the least expensive resort in the compound but it was close. What made it a bit less desirable was that it wasn’t on the beach, it was across the street from the beach. In my mind this wasn’t a problem. I was happy to trade a thousand dollars in savings for a short walk to the white sands. That money went to getting a second room for the kids so my wife and I had some privacy. Like I said, a great trade off in my mind. I’ve been wanting to go to an All-Inclusive for some time and because of this I tried to maximize my time there. I scheduled what seemed to me to be an impossibly long trip, nine days. It was a great trip with lots of great experiences. One of the more unique experiences had to do with the makeup of the guests at the resort, specifically the Europeans.
I didn’t realize how ‘international’ the RIU resorts were. I read lots of reviews and watched lots of videos on the properties before I committed. Nowhere was the demographic makeup of guests of the properties spelled out. I knew the company didn’t heavily market to Americans, at least not in mainstream media channels like the Sandals brand does. I also knew it was big and it has properties all over the world. I probably should have figured it’d be mostly Europeans who vacationed there but I was inexperienced with international resorts. Day after day I’d see Tui Tour buses bring in hundreds of guests from Europe. Tui is a multi-billion leisure and travel conglomerate that serves the European market and it felt like half their business was bringing people to the RIU Tequila.
On the positive side, the experience was very familiar. It was the proverbial ‘cruise on land’ that I expected. Everyone was in a good mood and why wouldn’t they be, they were on vacation. I met a bunch of chatty people. That’s when I realized that pretty universally, every European was there for two weeks. These were not well to do people. They were truck drivers and teachers and admin staff at companies. I knew that the rest of the world values leisure time more than Americans do. There is a great planet money episode that explains how this came to be. It’s one thing to know something, yet it’s another thing entirely to experience it. All of a sudden my unbelievably long vacation that I could brag about now seemed like I was cutting myself short. To add insult to injury, my wife, and my friend who I vacation with, both had to open their laptops half of the days we were there and get work done. This vacation was planned very long in advance. Yet our work environment is so driven my wife and friend had to work while they were there.
I’ve recently aligned with the thinking of the Europeans with regards to travel. For the longest time I put off traveling. It’s comically expensive when you still have kids. Even if cost wasn’t an issue, travel is physically uncomfortable because of my back issues. Then things started changing. I developed other age related health issues. Friends my age started dying of natural causes. All that, plus looking at a calendar and accepting my advancing age, made me realize if these trends continue I may not be able to travel at some point. So I chose to grit my teeth and get out there even if it’s physically uncomfortable.
Another motivating factor is that unlike decades past, I now have the time. I’m an educator working a traditional school year. That’s ten weeks in the summer plus other blocks of time in the year I have off. Putting the money issue aside, it is a perfectly balanced life. It’s not quite work hard / play hard which I hate as I think that lifestyle concept is a hamster trap fostered on young and impressionable employees by high pressure organizations in an effort to maximize productivity at the expense of said employees. It’s more work and play in near perfect balance.
I’ve even recently relearned that longer trips are better. It’s easier to unwind. It reminds me of my very first cruise I took in my twenties. I chose a seven night trip and for the first two or three days, I recall still being high strung and looking at the trip like work, where I had to do everything and keep a schedule. An attitude I’ve actually talked about in my blog. It was only by day three that I started to actually relax and just go with the flow. But on a seven day cruise this means as soon as you feel relaxed it’s time to go home with all the activity that entails. Achieving that relaxed state for longer time periods is now my focus. I think of my current vacation goal as 3x2 Three trips at two weeks or more each. If I could afford a place on a lake or the beach, I’d maybe make that 2+2+4. Two destination vacations at two weeks each. And a month at my lake or beach place.
So I’ve just vented about American leisure values. That’s all well and good, but for an American it’s like shouting into the wind. Virtually everyone has truncated vacation schedules and that’s not going to change anytime soon. So, if I want to travel the question becomes who can I go with? As the RIU experience showed, my friends and family with traditional jobs can’t get away easily. My wife has jumped through hoops to work remotely for several of our trips, but a working spouse isn’t all that much fun as you can’t do things together during the workday. I have some school friends who have the same time off as me but they have spouses who aren’t big fans of them leaving. A few others who could go away for extended trips aren’t really in my circle. I could go by myself and make contacts on FB. That sort of worked. I could look into travel clubs for solo travelers. Like my friend’s spouses, my wife isn’t a big fan of that either. I could take one of my kids but our schedules don’t quite align for the summer. Speaking of kids, my teen doesn’t want to travel. His friends are here, his digital screens are here, and more importantly, his part-time job, and the social outlet it provides, is here. It’s a conundrum that I frankley haven’t figured out the solution too. I do know I’m committed to not sticking around if I can travel. Even if I do, the money thing is another issue I have to navigate. Of course my time off comes at the most expensive season of the year to travel. But this article is more about time than money.
Even if I don’t have the answer for myself, I do have some ideas on how we can fix this in America. Technically we could mandate six weeks paid vacation like other parts of the world. That will never happen in the current political environment. Even if it did, our culture is one of work. You’d have to have a “use it or pay it with penalty structure.” What I mean by that is the laws have to be structured so that it incentivizes actual paid time off for employees. If employees take paid vacation, they are good. If they didn’t take vacation, the company would have to pay out the unused vacation money and something like a 10 or 20% tax on top if the employee doesn’t take time off. Over time I can see where this would change the culture just like it did in other parts of the world. Of course there would have to be legislation that enforces employees being completely off without employers forcing them to work while they are on ‘vacation’. But what about the people who are encultured to work of which, to be clearly honest, I am one? Cultural change is hard and it was very hard for me to change my mindset. I know from personal experience these people will resent being forced to take time off.
The world does vacations better than we do. I want to do vacations like the rest of the world, and I’ve structured my life to do so. Unfortunately, because I live here in America, I’m pretty much alone in this.
This problem is only going to get more complicated as the years go by and the kids get older, at least while they live with us. This is a problem I would like to overcome but as I said, there are no easy solutions. I’m going to keep working on this as I do feel that clock ticking, and I know that the day will come where I won’t be able to travel like I have in the past. For now it’s like a ground war, where I have to figure out different social logistics for every single trip. Thinking about it all, maybe the solution is right here in this article. I should just take my next few trips over to Europe. That way I can make some new friends. The best part is I know they will have the time to travel with me.
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