Can You Relax on Vacation?

Not all of us can.

I was at the spa, nestled in a warm cocoon of a massage table getting layers of cleansers and masks spread and scrubbed off on my face when the spa attendant whispered to me: “Relllllax, Ms. Foster.” She pressed down on my shoulders, which were apparently hiked up to my ears, and I exhaled.

“Yes, I am, er, I will,” I said, feeling apologetic and a bit embarrassed. “I’m a little tight in the shoulders.” The attendant chuckled.

Maybe I was a little tight everywhere, I thought.

My family and I were visiting Turks and Caicos for the second half of December break, and we’d arrived two days before. Why wasn’t I already in full relaxation mode? As I lay there under a steam machine, my thoughts wandered to exactly how many days it takes before a person can fully feel relaxed on vacation. Then I wondered: Why am I feeling tense when I’m visiting one of the most beautiful islands in the Caribbean?

There are large numbers of articles, I’ve come to find out, that tackle this very subject: why it’s so hard to relax on vacation. One article suggested that you should sleep as much as possible during the first few days of your trip; clearly, the author didn’t have kids. Adorable little hellions aside, my husband and I were turning in earlyish each night. We weren’t sleep starved. It wasn’t that.

A recent Time magazine article suggested that to relax on vacation you should separate yourself from your work email and social media. But that’s something I always do; I rarely spend extraneous time on my phone while I’m traveling. I see going away as sacred time with my husband and kids, and if I sit on my phone too much, it defeats the point of being together.

But traveling with kids can be stressful. My little one was sick two days before we left. It cast a shadow on the trip. Would one of us get sick on island? (We didn’t.) The kids wanted to play volleyball for an hour in the hot sun, and my husband and I reluctantly got off our loungers to play. It turned out to be really fun, and yet, I realized mid punch of the volleyball that it’s no wonder I felt like I couldn’t take it down a notch.

No matter where in the world we went, I was still “mom,” and what I mean by that is that there was no slipping away into a cocktail and a good book (although there are always glimpses of it). The kids were still teasing each other, they were still hungry all the time, we still needed to book excursions. At one point, at dinner on the first night, my husband and I, tired of the kids antics, turned to each other: "Hello, how are you?” We broke into laughter.

One article I read said that if you’re trying to relax on vacation, you need to ask yourself what is relaxing to you. For me, it’s reading, running, yoga and swimming in the pool with the kids (in doses; I always get cold). The day after my facial, I did just that. I went for a three mile run along the resort area. When I got back to the beach, I finally felt relaxed. Then I did yoga the following morning. Doubling down on some me time.

Then I remembered that one thing that makes me happiest on vacation is doing something new. Apparently, I’m not alone. Being spontaneous can make people dial it down because they’re living outside of their normal routines. (It can stress some people out, but I love that feeling.)

On a whim, we decided to volunteer to walk a 10 week old puppy living in a rescue center on the island. It’s kind of a thing in the Grace Bay resort area. You pop over to Pottycake Place at 10am, “adopt” a puppy for the morning to help socialize it, then return it at the end of the day. As soon as I picked up the little dog, I felt myself melt into a pool of deep joy. My kids, husband and I were falling all over that little mutt named Miller.

“Can we take him home? Please, mom, please!” my 8-year-old daughter begged me.

“I’ll walk him, I promise,” said my 13-year-old.

I smiled. God, I wanted that dog. But you can’t get too far outside of yourself on vacation, can you? I thought of our current golden doodle Luna, and walking her and another dog. I remembered how hard it was to train a puppy, and I thought of how disrupted our life routine would be if we made such a spontaneous decision. Just the thought of it made me lose that sense of gooey relaxation I’d been experiencing.

“Not this time, guys,” I said. They begged and begged, and we nuzzled the puppy one last time. By the time we gave him back, everyone had convinced themselves that Miller would be adopted in no time.

Part of relaxing on vacation is knowing what you want. At that moment, all I wanted was to get back to that crystalline water, finish my book and embrace the fact that it was was day four and I was fully, fully ready to chill and finish the second half of the vacation.

I’m curious about you when you travel. Do you find that you can get into the groove of being away or does it take you some time? My husband and I always feel like we need two weeks for a trip to feel really relaxing. The first week, you adjust, the second week, you enjoy. But we can’t always get two weeks off!