www.Tobold.com
Tobold@GMail.com
A blog with my thoughts regarding games I am playing and other stuff in life. Please read my Terms of Service
RSS Feed
Friday, July 31, 2026
What is the purpose of holidays?
Let me show you my holiday selfie:
As you might have guessed, this image was created with AI (ChatGPT). If I actually wanted to visit the Greek island of Santorini with the famous blue roofs, that would probably be a rather horrible experience. Every day, thousands of people disembark there from their cruise ship, only to stand in line for hours at the best spots to make holiday selfies. The purpose isn't to actually have a good time, but to produce an image for Instagram or some other social media platform. Producing the same image with AI to me seems the better solution. At least it was a lot faster, cheaper, and less unpleasant.
At this time of the year, end of July, I always used to be on summer holidays. Europeans have up to 6 weeks of holidays per year, and taking something like 3 weeks during the summer is very common. As many people have children, they take holidays during the summer school holidays. And although I don't have children, the absence of so many colleagues meant that there were few meetings at work during the summer. So it was better to take your holidays during this time where there wasn't much going on at work anyway.
If you had asked me a few years ago what the purpose of holidays is, I would have said rest and relaxation. We used to go to the seaside, stay for 3 weeks in a vacation rental, and not do very much at all other than taking walks and going to the beach. But then I retired. And out of habit we tried the exact same type of holiday again, and neither I nor my wife liked it anymore. It turns out that retirement has a lot of rest and relaxation and doing not much every day of the year, and a holiday to do nothing isn't really a break anymore. So we now take shorter holidays, and rather go to places where we can have some activity visiting things, cultural or historical. We also take holidays in June or September, rather than July/August, to avoid the rush. And we rather visit places that few people want to make Instagram holiday selfies of. There are a lot of beautiful spots within a few hours drive from where we live, in Belgium, Germany, or France. We take the plane to go on holidays a lot less than previously.
Despite the permanent narrative of a cost of living crisis and how badly everybody is doing, in 2025 global tourist arrivals hit 1.52 billions, breaking the pre-COVID record of 2019. As these tourists aren't evenly distributed, there are spots that you simply can't visit anymore in comfort, as they are completely overcrowded. Spain now has a number of tourist spots in which the local population stages massive protests against tourism, despite the economic benefit. But then, some forms of tourism, especially cruise ships, do not benefit the visited locations all that much, with most of the profit going to large corporations instead of local population.
European holidays are further complicated by climate change. Here is Belgium, yesterday it was 34°C or 93°F. Large swathes of Spain and southern France have been hit by huge wildfires this month. While previously there was a clear motivation to leave rainy Belgium during the holidays and visit a place in the sun, that motivation goes away quickly if the sun comes to Belgium and the place you wanted to visit is burning. And even if there aren't any wildfires, I wouldn't want to go somewhere where it is 40°C or more during the day. My preferred holiday weather would be 25°C and sunny, but these days this is more likely off season than during the summer months.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:30 PM Permanent Link
Comments:
<< Home
Newer› ‹Older
I often use my vacation days to just stay home as that tends to actually be more relaxing for me then going on a vacation. I guess I'm the stereotypical insular millennial who dislikes crowds and tourist spots.
Here's what a holiday is: Buy air tickets to somewhere. Fly there. Hire a car. Drive. Go to a new place every day, with maybe one two-night stop for a bit of a rest. Reckon to do maybe 200Km a day but it could be half or twice that. Don't have any set destinations. Maybe a rough plan of some general areas and a few names of towns or cities. Generally avoid anywhere that specializes in tourism. Market towns, small cities, country villages make good stops.
Do not book anything in advance. Drive until you see somewhere that looks interesting, stop there, find somewhere to stay. If there's nowhere, move on and try the next nice place. You will, always, find somewhere. It will often be very good, sometimes amazing, only occasionally no more than adequate. Wander about and look at things. There will always be interesting things to see. Eat, drink, chill. There will always be good places to eat, good bars, pretty parks and squares.
Keep this up until it's time to fly back. Make sure you're not more than a night's drive from the airport the night before. That's the holiday we took every year, sometimes twice a year, from the mid-90s to the pandemic. Not once did it ever fail. We always had a great time and we had a lot of adventures.
Now we have a dog so we can't really do it any more.
Post a Comment
Do not book anything in advance. Drive until you see somewhere that looks interesting, stop there, find somewhere to stay. If there's nowhere, move on and try the next nice place. You will, always, find somewhere. It will often be very good, sometimes amazing, only occasionally no more than adequate. Wander about and look at things. There will always be interesting things to see. Eat, drink, chill. There will always be good places to eat, good bars, pretty parks and squares.
Keep this up until it's time to fly back. Make sure you're not more than a night's drive from the airport the night before. That's the holiday we took every year, sometimes twice a year, from the mid-90s to the pandemic. Not once did it ever fail. We always had a great time and we had a lot of adventures.
Now we have a dog so we can't really do it any more.
<< Home
