Excerpted from The Great American Staycation (Copyright © 2009 by Matt Wixon. Reprinted by permission of Adams Media.)
Rule #1: A Staycation Must Be Treated as a Real Vacation
Just because you’re not getting on that cruise trip, you still need to do the same mental checkout of the real world that typical vacations entail. That means turning off your cell phone and not checking your e-mail each day. It means getting all the household chores done before the start of your staycation. It means not thinking, “If we leave the show just before the curtain falls, then we can beat traffic, I’ll be in bed before midnight, and can get up early tomorrow to mow the lawn.”
For any vacation, a staycation or something grander, you have to unplug. Unplug from work, from your chores, from the daily compulsion to get things done.
For rules 2-8, see the article in its entirety here at iVillage.com.
