You can go a long ways in a weekend

My family recently packed into our minivan for a weekend road trip to Cape Cod. We were dropping one kid off to stay with cousins for a week, and we all decided to go and say hello before leaving her.

This was a lot of driving as a proportion of total weekend time. We left the house at 7:45 a.m. on Saturday and arrived around 2:30 p.m. We left at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday and came home at 9:30 p.m. (not on purpose…traffic was bad!). I wouldn’t want to do that every weekend, but on the other hand, the kids had a good time and made memories with family, even if the trip was quick.

The experience got me thinking about how many places one could actually get to in a weekend if that were the goal. Lots of us say we want to travel more, but “travel” tends to conjure up images of a week (or more) spent on vacation. It’s going to require a lot of time off work and/or waiting for the kids to be on break from school. By its nature, such travel can’t be frequent.?

But weekends are like mini-vacations that happen every week. I’ve learned from traveling to speak at events just how quickly you can get in and out of a place if you’re trying to get back due to complex kid and childcare schedules.

In April, I was in and out of Phoenix in less than 36 hours, door to door from Philadelphia. I don’t really think of Phoenix as a “weekend” destination, but if I’d left on a flight on Friday night and returned on a Sunday afternoon flight, that would have felt luxuriously long compared with the time I was actually there! I still managed to see some lovely things (like Phoenix’s Desert Botanical Garden) while I was visiting. I didn’t manage to see as much as Phoenix has to offer, of course, but even if I’d been there for weeks, that would be true.

In any case, if there’s somewhere you’d like to see or someone you’d like to visit, consider if it might be possible to do so in a weekend. You might be surprised at where you can go. You might wish you could have more time, but the upside of a weekend trip is you might be able to do it again before too long! Whereas if you’re holding out for a week or more, it might never happen. Personally, I’m a fan of trips that do happen — they tend to make better memories.

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