My top 5 tips for taking a staycation.

The staycation got popular during the pandemic, but it’s great anytime.

Some people don’t want to act like a tourist where they live, but before you settle on that, read my defense of the tourist in last week’s newsletter.

1. Go to a hotel.

It may seem silly to stay in a hotel when you could sleep in your own bed but think about how much you’re saving on not paying for transportation by not traveling. Invest that plane fare or gas money in a hotel and room service for breakfast. Not having to do the dishes or laundry can be a vacation all by itself. Any hotel with a pool and spa is definitely a vacation. Search on sites like Booking, just like you would if you were going somewhere unfamiliar. It might turn up somewhere unexpected.

2. Make a budget for the vacation.

Whether you’re traveling, or staying closer to home, you need a budget. Start with how much you would spend on transportation, hotels, and restaurants for the same number of days if you were going to another city, state, or country. Pick whichever one you would most logically do, depending on the money you have available for vacations.

3. Check travel blogs for your city.

There have been enough travel bloggers in the past couple decades that you can find a travel blog for just about anywhere. If a search for “City Name, travel blog” doesn’t come up with anything, search for your local chamber of commerce, whose job is to promote your city.

4. Check review sites for events and activities.

Are there any yearly festivals or events? Plan your staycation for that week or weekend. Think about the things you want to see when you visit another city: monuments, museums, parks, gardens, restaurants, and shopping areas. Check websites like Viator to see what tourists are doing.

5. Broaden your search to an hour or two radius from home.

Over twenty years ago, I lived in Rifle, Colorado.

Rifle was a tiny town, with only one stoplight at the time. If you had suggested a staycation to me at the time, I would have laughed. Rifle didn’t have a coffee shop, there were only a couple restaurants, no historic monuments, no movie theater, and the only place to shop in town was the singular grocery store.

Yet, within an hour north of town were aspen forests with great mountain biking trails in the summer and world class waterfall ice climbing in the winter. Just an hour either south or west of Rifle the landscape opened up and there were amazing places to go hiking or mountain biking on picturesque expanses of red and orange sandstone. An hour to the east was the touristy town of Carbondale. If I included everything I could drive to in an hour, a staycation would have been amazing.

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Ensifera Ensifera Hummingbird Gardens 

About two hours from Cusco is the best place to see hummingbirds in the Sacred Valley. Click on the blog title above to see the hummingbirds I photographed there and how to get to the gardens. The unusual name is actually the scientific name of the most famous hummingbird you can see there: the Sword-billed hummingbird.

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Cusco, One of the Highest Cities in the World

The editor picked the title, not me, so don’t think that this is a review of where to buy pot in Cusco. It’s a reference to the altitude, which visitors have to take into account their first day or two here. This is a list of fun things to do in Cusco, which has been my hometown now for almost five years. No matter how long I live here, I’ll always feel like a tourist when I go to the archeological sites, the plazas, museums, or fancy restaurants in the historic center. I don’t feel like a tourist in my neighborhood, but then again my neighborhood doesn’t have an archeological site, a plaza, or any museums or fancy restaurants.