Never again, not for me [NOT 4/3/24]

4/3/24 brightersideoflife 34

Hi, friends! A few of my Facebook friends have embarked on vacations recently that look like my own version of hell.

Do you have a vacation type you just don’t like (without being dismissive or insulting to people who do like it)? I want to be clear, I get why lots of folks like things I don’t. I also get why some people hate things I do.

For example, I really enjoy cruises. I like sitting on a boat in the middle of nowhere staring at nothing but ocean. I have friends terrified of water and drowning, absolutely understand why they would never cruise. Also most of my travel stress and anxiety is about getting from place to place, and with cruises once my ass is on the boat, it’s someone else’s problem to figure out all those logistics!

Meanwhile, camping? 100% not for me. I don’t want to haul things in, set things up, clean up all that stuff, and do all that extra work while I’m on a trip. Plus I attract mosquitoes and ticks so amazingly well (even using the strong bug spray) that I’m just miserable from it. If I could attract men the way I can blood-sucking insects, I’d be set for life. But also I can totally understand the appeal for lots of reasons. Closer to beautiful natural views, cost savings, traveling with pets or a larger group, just getting away from it all for solitude, etc etc.

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34 Comments

  1. Camping, canoeing and hiking I enjoy, but I get why a lot of people don’t.

    It also depends on who you go with. If you got someone who’s accident prone, lousy map reader or really unhealthy especially for deep woods hiking then maybe they should stay home (I knew someone who was all 3.)

    I enjoyed the canoe trips, but hated the portage especially if I was stuck with someone who was much taller than myself. I banged my head a lot on the fucking canoe thanks to the various too tall folks I went with.

    My parents enjoyed cruises for the same reason you did. They loved those seniors tours. The last one was going to be from Tokyo to Okinawa to Iwo Jima to Taipei to Hong Kong to Manilla to Port Morsby to Brisbane to Hawaii then back to Tokyo. It was going to happen Feb 2020, but fortunately my parents didn’t (cough CoVID cough.) I also wondered why they wanted to go on a cruise that was pretty much the reverse course of the Pacific Theater in WW2.

    Never really liked the idea of going to 3rd world tropical resorts. I get all mentally uncomfortable being waited hand and foot while knowing that a few miles away was a place I would feel extremely uncomfortable/unsafe in.

    • Funny canoe trip/portage story. Not my own because fuuuuuuuuuuuck that. But my dad has been going on fishing trips to Canada with a a varying combo of brothers, nephews, & friends since before I was born.

       

      One year (I think it was an all brothers trip) someone gave everyone a very mild case of food poisoning. I don’t remember the details how. This was back when they were young enough to still be dragging their crap from lake to lake and staying in tents (now they pick a cabin and have enough beer flown in for a week). So someone had to step over a log and that opened the gates. Shat themselves. “Overstrode” my dad called it. Everyone took wary steps for the next 24 hrs.

  2. I have a friend who, with his wife, signed up a year in advance for a two-week rafting trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. It was dee-lux, so you brought everything you needed for two weeks, or told them what you’d need, and you’d raft along and vans would follow you. I don’t know how this worked. You would come to a point every afternoon/evening and the vans would disgorge your crap. You and the other rafters would have to set up your tents, cook your own food (somehow), and keep an eye on the liquor supply.

    Sounds like the seventh circle of Hell to me, but this is the guy who, upon seeing Pikes Peak, said, “That’s it? Is there a bar around here? Where do all the hot Air Force cadets hang out?” [Pikes Peak is in Colorado Springs, where the US Air Force Academy is.]

    • Cousin Mattie, you need a good old fashioned Midwestern float trip. It’s one of the few things Missouri does well.

      You park most cars at one spot at the end of the float trip route (usually you float for a few hours)  with your coolers and bbq food stuff and some of the booze.

      Then you take the other cars to where you’re embarking, along with a bunch of inner tubes or inflatable rafts. A few people have small coolers as well (boozy hydration and some snacks are key).

      Then you just slowly float along down the river for a few hours, laughing and drinking and hanging out. You do as little work as possible.

      Get to the end, have the bbq and drink some more. Then load up the cars, go pick up the other cars, and head home.

      • Now that I would enjoy.

        By the way, I normally love being out on the water. I love cruising (small boats, small passenger list.) To the point where I’ve been places where they had car ferries but also bridges, and I would say, “Oh, no, let’s wait for the ferry.” So it would pull up eventually and we’d squeeze aboard with our rental.

        It’s because I’m a Pisces, I think.

  3. I have no desire to go on a big cruise ship w/ 5000 90 year olds, mass produced food & waiting forever to get on & off & tell me I can’t have my own liquor?  I love small ships & would gladly do a small ship cruise or rent a sailboat with friends   We have talked about doing this in Tonga

    https://www.moorings.com/yacht-charter/sailing-charter

    We used to love camping when we had an RV. You have your own kitchen & bathroom, all the stuff you want like bikes & kayaks, and just plug in & done. What you don’t think about is the upkeep of RVs is very expensive & never ends.  We sold ours when the girls got too cool to want to camp w/ us though now that they are in college, we are cool again!  I’m not sure how I got cool again but happy I am!

     

      • You can but they charge a bunch per mile & rentals can be nasty.  Mine was 24ft long so basically the size of a big van/truck, powerful & easy to drive.  Most of the rentals are larger with gutless motors. They also don’t come with kayak racks because they don’t want you walking on the roof.  I had custom roof racks for my boats.

      • I conceptually love the idea of renting a small RV for a road trip, especially one out west where there’s a lot of distance between stuff.

        But also, ehhh I don’t even like driving bigger SUVs so really what the actual fuck am I thinking here???

  4. My family did a short cruise out of Florida for a few days and I liked it. It was easy to find a deck chair in a quiet shady place and just hang out with a coffee and a pastry while the kids wandered around.

    I’d probably go stir crazy for a long one, even with shore trips, but that was the right length.

    • 5-6 days was the sweet spot for me for cruising. Enough time to relax and enjoy someone else doing all the cooking and cleaning for a few days, not too long that my digestive tract got mad at me for not making my own food.

  5. We are polar opposites. No fucking way will I be on a cruise. Aside from the fact that I would be puking my guts out the whole time, just what I’m seeing on the commercials is…not enticing.
    However I love camping and being out in the wilderness. Mrs Butcher however refuses. So no camping for me either.

  6. I’ve not vacationed in blocks of time in (consults watch) decades. I do get time off, but prefer to use it in one-day increments on a Friday to get a loooong weekend. Nirvana is relaxing at home. The logistics of getting anywhere from here, stowing the four dogs, and ensuring that I have access to email for a variety of work reasons feels overwhelming.

    Now, @brightersideoflife I wonder if we could work with your bug-attracting pheromes to create an antidote and expand it into a man-off spray. I can see the commercials now, “Are you tired of mansplaining from entitled males who focus on your chest while doing so? Get Man Off! One spray will keep them away!”

  7. oh jeez…i appreciate @memeweaver advertising the gofundme atl on their duans and i truly appreciate the contributions. i’m currently waiting for a payment to come off my credit card tomorrow and i’ll post the costs of running the site with receipts.

    two years ago, i switched the site from us to canada and because the site is so massive i had to upgrade to a larger server with the host and my own back up server which was 2,400$ total without my own contribution…that y’all were so kind to contribute.

    this year the initial cheap deal for joining the host ends and i think the number is 887$ just for one year of hosting plus the plugins i pay for. i’ll explain all that in a post…with receipts.

    within a couple years i will be in a better spot to just pay for it all myself and i won’t gaf…but the help helps. i am at the point that last year has been covered by your contributions and some of this year is paid for.

    • So, I have been hosting a bunch of websites on this host since early 2000’s.  Plug-ins are free & it has been mostly really good though tech support is not the best at times.  You know way more than me about this stuff but you may want to look into it.  I used to have unlimited space & was going to offer to give you space but I think they lowered my total space.

      https://www.imhosted.com

      • the plugins i pay for are wp-rocket and imagify. wp-rocket is for cache and imagify is something i use simply to clear meta from uploaded images for security/privacy.

         

        if they are free in your deal, i’ll look further into it.

        • I’ll email you tomorrow when I am on my big computer & send you some info & screenshots or give you logins to wander around & see if it would work.

      • i intended to include in the comment that i edited and left some out by accident that i am not requesting money. in fact, it is the opposite. between last year and this year the gofundme is closer to this year being paid than last and i am appreciative to all who’ve contributed to get there. i am willing to pay 100% which is something i don’t want unsaid.

        any contributions that put the total over the actual costs which, again, i’ll post receipts, i’ll put into a pool for future considerations.

        …or just throw it all into [insert online betting commercial you are sick of here] AZ Wilcats winning March Madness so y’all can be disappointed with me?

  8. I totally forgot: I had the best of both possible worlds. I was camping with my oldest brother, the one who died, and his family, and they were friendly with the family on the next lot, and their son befriended me, and dragged out their sailboat. So there I was camping, and then “cruising” sort of, on the lake where the campground was situated, and once we got out of what we thought was eyeshot we went at it like rabid monkeys.

    Those were the days, my friend.

  10. I can’t do cruises.  The idea of being stuck on a boat in the middle of water with a bunch of people I don’t know is way too much for me.  I would constantly be in fear that someone called a “social director” would try to get me to wear a funny hat or make me do some creepy activity.

    Now if someone I knew had a yacht (they don’t), with bocce ball and a karaoke machine I could definitely see me doing that.

    I also don’t like long flights, so my days of international travel are probably behind me.

    • I realize that good, boring stories don’t make the news, but the combo of norovirus, people going overboard, questionable labor practices, and environmental horrors keep me off cruise ships.

      I am enjoying the tiktoks/youtube videos coming off the 9 month cruise, though. Schadenfreude-style.

  11. My mom’s side of the family are currently in Cambodia for their 50th year post genocide return/reunion… well those without young kids and those who aren’t feuding… so half of the lot. I considered joining them but then realized that that trip is exactly one version of my personal Hells. Heat, humidity, mosquitos, small boat rides, extended family full of strong stubborn personalities, jet lagged picky eater child (I was thinking of only bringing my eldest)… No thank you. Got an email from my aunt yesterday saying that they are all suffering from diarrhea and it’s +40°C over there. Bowing out of that trip is possibly the best decision that I’ve ever made.

    After having kids, we’ve only used our vacation time to visit family.

    My ideal vacation is to rent a car and explore a European country with my husband or my best friend or solo.

    • Over a decade ago I was once asked to go on a trip to Korea with mom and my sisters. I said “I have no money and HELL NO.” It was about the only benefit to being unemployed at the time.

      As per the family dynamic the three of them like to fight each other when the family traveled and as the only male I would have spent most of the time as referee (which is one of the reasons why dad refused to go.)

      My eldest sister said it was a hell trip.  Mom was grouchy and miserable the whole damn time while sniping at both of them. My little sister got really sick during the trip and was popping the Korean version Imodium while trying to keep her insides from exploding. My oldest sister was kicking herself because it was her idea.

      I warned her, but she went anyway. It seems one of my family’s mottos is “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  12. tbh….i hate the traveling part of…uhh…traveling

    wasnt too bad when i had a car….but i hate public transport and flying

    i am not designed to sit still for any length of time….

    just teleport me to my destination and i’ll be a-ok

    boats are fine too….yeah it takes longer….but i get to wander about…and i love being out on deck

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