The lure of local travel

Research
How did I find all this great stuff to do? It was almost too easy — the Yellow Pages, the local weekly newspaper, the local tourist office and, of course, the Web. It took me about a total of two hours to find maybe a month's worth of attractions, interesting lodging options, eating establishments, and activities I had never seen, tried, visited or even known about. Compare that to the time it takes to research and book some flights, find a hotel, reserve a rental car and pick a few restaurants, and it's pretty much a wash. And I can do all of them for less money than I would spend just getting somewhere else to do all the same stuff at some distant destination.

Slow travel, volunteer vacations and other recent trends
Slow travel, educational travel, and volunteer vacations are among the trendiest approaches to theme travel in this century, but none of them require going far away. For instance, scrambling through airports and jetting at extraordinarily high speeds across an ocean and six countries only to slow down for six nights in a villa in southern Italy seems more like a slow travel sandwich on hyper-speed white bread to me. What could be more slow than never venturing more than five or six miles from your home? This is a big part of what slow travel is all about, after all — going somewhere to live like the locals. You have a pretty good head start in your own home town.

I'm not trying to denigrate the "international" version of slow travel that has gained considerable currency lately, of course; I think it is a really neat idea, and I'd done my fair share before it had a name and a Web site. Similarly, while I find volunteer vacations to be an admirable use of your time and money, there's no reason why you can't take a volunteer vacation in your own community. Sure, it's more exotic to travel farther for your volunteering opportunity, but it's not necessarily more needed than delivering meals to homebound or disadvantaged folks nearby. Spending Thanksgiving Day serving meals to poverty-stricken people near your own home is no less transformative than doing the same in Ecuador. And the same goes for educational travel — why not take a cooking class or learn to play a musical instrument in your own community?

Go the distance (without going the distance)
Do everything you would do on a regular trip before you leave home — stop the paper delivery, hold the mail, change your voice mail, turn on your vacation e-mail auto-responder. When you are 10 miles from home, behave just like you would if you were 1,000 miles away.

The gravitational pull of your daily routine can be every bit as strong as the centrifugal force that makes you want to escape it; both are balancing evils to avoid. What you are going for is stability. As the saying goes, wherever you go, there you are — take care to make sure of it.

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