Example Of Summer Vacation

As we cut the umbilical cord and float away from our significant others and loved ones, we can’t help but think back to all of the memories created as time progressed. It was a time of year that can’t be duplicated again in any way, shape, or form — it was summer vacation. Welcome to the first installment of a three part series about summer vacation ideas for families. We are going to look at three popular options and weigh the pros and cons of each.

I am very excited and looking forward to the coming summer vacation. I have been working in a big company for a year now, and the first time that I traveled abroad was during Christmas with my family. We spent five days in Brussels and Lille (Belgium), which had very traditional Christmas markets and you should visit them if you decide to go there! Traveling is a privilege, but then again the entire journey is just not that simple. You need to make sure you have the right travel insurance, book tickets in advance, avoid traffic from your home and how do you plan for your ride to your destination. It all sounds like one big project which is why the best way to tackle it is through proper planning.

Example Of Summer Vacation

The Manager asked us to come into the office two days after the close of a big deal. We were nervous. The economic downturn had not been good to us and so we all wondered if we were going to lose our jobs. As usual, she gave no hint beforehand what was in store for us. She asked Ramesh, Nidhi and me to join her in the conference room. Her demeanor was more serious than usual and I could see that she had something important to tell us. She thanked everyone for the work that they had done. Then she said that she always wanted her staff to get an opportunity for some training at an expensive management institute abroad, but due to budget restrictions this hadn’t been possible until now.

It’s that time of year: The mercury rises, pulses quicken, and the days get longer. The noisome odors of sunscreen, lighter fluid, and bug spray blend into a symphony of smells, smells that bring with them the feeling of freedom and the distinct sense that life has shifted into a lower gear. Vacation’s just around the corner, and those with the leisure time and money can choose from any number of trips to go on. Not surprisingly, a commonplace of tourist marketing is that the kind of vacation you go on says a lot about who you are.

Scholarship on tourism and vacation suggests that there are actually five distinct kinds of vacations that people these days tend to take:

• The Paradise
• The Wild
• The Ruin
• The Living Culture
• The Playground

If a list of types makes vacations sound about as prepackaged and mass produced as airplane food, it’s because they are. Scholars who study tourism have found that there’s actually a surprisingly narrow range of ways that people can go on holiday.

The Paradise

The beaches of Club Med and Sandals resorts are examples of destinations for the classic paradise vacation, but the presence of a beach isn’t necessarily a requirement. Rather, the paradise is epitomized by the combination of lush beauty with extras like wi-fi, spa treatments, and a well-stocked bar. Ironically, the very presence of these conveniences can threaten the natural beauty that draws people to these kinds of destinations. The growing presence of industry can overwhelm the delicate balance of nature and civilization that’s at the heart of the paradise vacation idea.

The earliest origins of spring break lie in the middle of the Great Depression, before college campuses began in earnest to build heated indoor swimming pools.

In the case of something like spring break, there can be an ugly tipping point, as the historian James Schlitz suggests in the Florida Historical Quarterly. The earliest origins of spring break lie in the middle of the Great Depression, before college campuses began in earnest to build heated indoor swimming pools. Schlitz writes that coaches at northern colleges began bringing their swimmers down south during the spring holidays to get a jump on training. Even before the GI Bill swelled the ranks of collegians, swim meets taking place in Fort Lauderdale during the break drew increasing numbers of coeds to the beach. This proved to be the kernel of a tourist industry that would bring both prosperity and ruin to the area.

As early as the1950s, Schlitz tells us, spring break in Fort Lauderdale had already gotten a reputation for its loose moral atmosphere. Civic leaders who sponsored a wholesome singles dance found it sparsely attended, while most early spring breakers sought an unsupervised environment. The next thirty years saw the town’s more respectable Mom and Pop businesses replaced by t-shirt shops, shabby motels, and beach bars that burned through as many as 100 kegs a day. One police chief described the scene as “heaps of garbage in a tropical setting.”

The early 1980s were the straw that broke the camel’s back. After the 1985 season, Fort Lauderdale’s spring break scene was abruptly brought to a halt through a mix of code enforcement, cement barriers, and ominous PR. Schlitz cites Chamber of Commerce figures to show that, within five years, both spring break visitors and revenue had dropped to just 10% of their 1985 peak, much to the relief of Fort Lauderdale’s remaining full-time residents. Miraculously, civic pressures had successfully turned on the bright lights of closing time. But as we can see every March, there have been countless other beach towns ready to accept the torch that the original home of spring break was only too eager to pass on.

The Wild

While the paradise vacation combines escapism with luxury and convenience, some travelers prefer to take their natural beauty with a side order of roughing it. U.S. culture invests the wilderness with overlapping and sometimes conflicting meanings. The most enduring of these is the belief that frontier exploration is the antidote to an excessive feminization caused by the softening comforts of the modern home. As the historian Adrienne Rose Johnson writes in “Romancing the Dude Ranch, 1926-47,” neither vacationers nor their rustic guides were safe from the refining influence of domesticity.

With the official closure of the frontier in 1890, urban Americans began filling their increasing amounts of leisure time by seeking adventure in the rugged outdoors. In response to this demand, dude ranches of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries staged a nostalgic version of the cattle-rustling frontier family, soothing tensions created by the linked phenomena of industrialization and women’s liberation. While Eastern tourists embraced the rugged lifestyle of the wrangler, wranglers on dude ranches also feared that the shift from a production economy to a tourist economy was robbing them of their toughness. Even more alarming was the threat of attractive female tourists, who often frequented such places with a view not to wrangling cattle, but to wrangling a husband.

The “demand” for handsome young wranglers led to ranchers recruiting sham wranglers from the ranks of collegiate men. And in Nevada, women going through quickie divorces began to frequent “divorce ranches,” finding comfort in either the wisdom of a frontier woman confidante or the arms of a wrangler. In particular, Johnson’s article highlights the ballads, postcards, and promotional brochures coming out of ranch tourism that depict a scene entirely unlike anything we might have expected. Whereas the tourist ranch had begun as a place to reconnect with a primal toughness, it ended up resembling a folksy spa that allowed visitors to play dress up and forget about the present by fantasizing about an idealized national past.

The Ruin

Not surprisingly, fantasizing about the past is a primary driver for vacationers who set their sights on visiting ruins. For the comparative literary scholar Andreas Huyssen, the twin forces of erasure and nostalgia animate the ruin-centered vacation. People are drawn by an attraction to the past, he contends, an attraction made even more emotionally magnetic by the remaining traces of structures, their inhabitants, and the civilizations that supported them. Yet this attraction is still rooted in the traveler’s experience of the present.

The practice of visiting contested sacred spaces such as Jerusalem comes with even more poignant and tense connections between an imagined past and a material present, as the anthropologist Jackie Feldman notes in a 2007 issue of American Ethnologist. An Israeli tour guide, Feldman notes the actual and imagined boundaries between Judeo-Christians, on one hand, and Muslims and Palestinians, on the other, created by her own professional practice.