How long are your vacations? Do you prefer short trips or long ones?

[adelaster]

Hello all! Interested in hearing how many days/nights you usually travel away from home at a time. Do you prefer splitting out vacations throughout the year, or do you take one long trip? How often do you take time off, and how do you spend it?

Personally, I've discovered that my magic number is five nights away from home as a "long" trip, bookended by weekends. We have pets and any longer than that is too long to be separated. Most of my vacations are about two-five nights, and I find I am happiest when I can "get away" a few times a year, although that isn't always a fiscal possibility.

Do you do Disney any differently? Has travel changed for you over time?

Please share!

 

[soccerdad72]

Little bit of both. We often do a couple long weekend trips during the year plus one or two week long vacations. Every couple years we will do a longer trip (like next summer, we're doing a 12-night European cruise).

 

[lorimay]

We do some that are 2 nights (weekend getaways) The longest being close to 3 weeks.
I like the longer of course, but after 2 weeks, I'm ready to get home to my grandkids and my own bed!

 

[Marchand63]

We do a couple long weekends but at least 1 vacation is 8 nights or longer. Like next year we have an 8 day cruise from San Juan, we are going in 2 days early and staying 2 days after.

No pets,kids grown & gone - Let Freedom Ring!!!!

 

[leebee]

We are lucky in that we have family/close friends who live in interesting places (New Orleans, San Francisco, Colorado, Florida, Boston) and I've juggled SW cards so we have a ton of rapid rewards points, so we can travel more frequently than our budget should actually allow. Having said that, my favorite and most relaxing vacations are always 9 or 10 nights long. I always feel like I have enough time to tour like a madwoman, but also enough time to put my feet up and relax. When we take a longer vacation, I don't come home exhausted, and feeling like I need a vacation to recuperate from my vacation!

 

[disneychrista]

It is partly based on where I am heading. My shortest trip is 2 day / 1 night (Santa Cruz this summer). The longest was 15 days/14 nights (WDW).

If my only choices were three - 3day trips or one - 9 day trip, I think I would take the three - 3 day trips.

 

[Mizzoufan]

I prefer short trips.

 

[Klayfish]

Little bit of both, but typically at least a week. When we take a true "vacation", it's at least a week. Even if we're not going to WDW (which is where we go if we travel) and do a "staycation", it's at least a total of 9 days (5 weekdays bookended by the two weekends). Our summer vacations at Disney are 17 days now, because my job lets me work remote...so for a few days we're on vacation, but I work during the day and we hit WDW at night. We'll do shorter trips for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but they're still at least 9 days. We tried 3 and 4 day trips to WDW a few years ago. We enjoyed it, but found it was just too short for the travel we do. If we're doing a 3 or 4 day weekend, we'd rather stay around the house.

I know it would upset animal lovers, but our dog is not a consideration whatsoever for a long trip. I like the dog, but if we wanted to take a month long trip, I wouldn't give a second thought about leaving him at the dog sitter the entire time.

 

[adelaster]

Little bit of both, but typically at least a week. When we take a true "vacation", it's at least a week. Even if we're not going to WDW (which is where we go if we travel) and do a "staycation", it's at least a total of 9 days (5 weekdays bookended by the two weekends). Our summer vacations at Disney are 17 days now, because my job lets me work remote...so for a few days we're on vacation, but I work during the day and we hit WDW at night. We'll do shorter trips for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but they're still at least 9 days. We tried 3 and 4 day trips to WDW a few years ago. We enjoyed it, but found it was just too short for the travel we do. If we're doing a 3 or 4 day weekend, we'd rather stay around the house.

I know it would upset animal lovers, but our dog is not a consideration whatsoever for a long trip. I like the dog, but if we wanted to take a month long trip, I wouldn't give a second thought about leaving him at the dog sitter the entire time.

Wow! Sounds like your family is pretty lucky to travel so often at such length!

 

[ludari]

Well I've been known to take some shorter vacation trips and some longer vacation trips so it all depends on what my plans are. My absolute favorite vacations are when I'm gone for an entire month which I've done a few times but that typically leaves me with very little vacations days to do anything else so I only do this every few years. I usually spread out my vacation days throughout the year but my typical vacations are at between 7 and 14 days.

 

[Skippy918]

I like for trips to be at least a week, especially if I am flying somewhere. Ideally, if I had a lot more pto and unlimited funds, I would take a 2-3 week trip over summer, and a 5 day trip over spring break and Christmas.

 

[Klayfish]

Wow! Sounds like your family is pretty lucky to travel so often at such length!

Yes, very lucky, and I'm very thankful for it. DW works at the same school district that our kids attend. Here in the south, they never go more than 6 weeks in school without a week break (or longer). So they have a lot of off time. I'm allowed to work remote some times. So if I throw in a few work remote days, then a few true PTO days and bookend it with weekends/holidays, I can actually be in WDW for 8, 9, 10+ days and only take 3 or 4 days of vacation time. I tell my bosses how grateful I am for their flexibility quite frequently.

 

[SC Minnie]

I have 5 weeks of vacation so we do a mix of long and short. We'll usually take 2 separate week long vacation then a number of long weekends-- Fri-Mon throughout the year. The longest trip we took was 2 1/2 weeks. It was a great trip but I was ready to come back home to a routine.

 

[PollyannaMom]

I voted short. I like to get away two or three times a year, and I don't like leaving my pets for too long in one block.

 

[CdnCarrie]

Depends on where we are going. I get 5 weeks of vacation time a year and my oldest is now at the age that I prefer him not to miss too many days of school.
Lately we have done a week away in the winter (use to be longer when the kids were younger) and I take a few weeks in summer. Vacations range from a long weekend to 2.5 weeks. If we are doing a WDW trip we usually go for 10-12 nights.

 

[BLAZEY]

We do both. Both DH and I have generous vacation time. Sick time is paid and separate . I get 4 weeks and max out at 5. DH has almost 6 weeks. Any trips over overseas has been minimum 3 weeks. Our shorter trips have been to Disneyland (5 days plus 2 travel days) Disney World/ Universal (7 and 11 days plus 2 travels days). Anything less than 4 days is a weekend trip. We drive to down to Vancouver WA/Portland OR every couple of years as well.

 

[jdb in AZ]

Depends on the trip. Three days is too long for visiting some family members. Others, it takes at least a week.

When we're in Europe, a two week vacation is about right. After flying that far in a sardine can, it takes awhile for me to psych myself into another long flight.

 

[TipsyTraveler]

All of our trips have fallen within the 14-26 day range, with the exception of a couple of Disney trips that were 8 and 11 days. There are three reasons I prefer longer trips:

1) I like to give myself time for my brain to really relax and settle into vacation mode as opposed to feeling like the end of the trip is looming as soon as we just started to get into the swing of things (time zone adjustment, foreign culture, language barrier, currency exchange rate...)

2) Most of our travel is international and that doesn't generally lend itself to short trips. If I'm going to spend that much time and money to get to another continent, I'm going to make the most of it.

3) The biggest reason is the sheer amount of preparation that goes into us being able to travel. I have 7 pets and 6 fish tanks that need to be stocked on supplies, care instructions written out, medications refilled, emergency contact info prepared, etc. I need to find and coordinate a live-in petsitter, meaning my house has to be (in my mind) hotel clean from top to bottom for this person to stay in... It's a lot of work.

Also, I just can't think of anywhere nearby that I be interested in going for a weekend. We did go to Ireland for a four day festival weekend once and that was fun, but we'd already toured the country on a prior trip so I didn't feel like I was missing out by just being there for a few days like I would for a place that was new to me. And eons ago we did a few overnight trips to Atlantic City and came home joking that we felt refreshed like we'd been on vacation. So maybe I should give more thought to doing shorter trips more frequently. But then I think about all the work that would go into that and... Ugh.

 

[Bilberry]

When I was younger vacationing for a week was the norm and good fun. Now, I don't give the length of a vacation a whole lot of thought. What ever is on the agenda and the time it takes for the event is what matters most.

 

[bdcp]

We do 2-3 trips a year. In 2016 we did two long cruises (9 and 12 days) and a week at the beach. This year we did a 9 night spring cruise and we'll be doing a b2b on Oasis (14 days total) plus 5 days in WDW. Since our kids grew up, we go for longer vacations, usually during the school year. We did one week per year when they were still home, but once they left for college we started doing longer ones and at least two per year for the last 11 years. I get 5 weeks of annual leave per year and DH gets 4 (used to get 5, but he started a new job last month) and we use most of it every year.