A vacation close to home turned out to be exactly what one Connecticut family needed after an unusually demanding spring. Writing for Business Insider, Rebecca Hastings described how she booked a rental house just one hour from her front door, skipped the bucket-list itinerary, and came home rested for the first time in months.
The Case for a Vacation Close to Home
The context matters. Hastings’s family had packed a college graduation, a high school graduation, and a wedding into a single spring. By summer, she was travelling with her husband and three children aged 17 to 21, plus a spouse and a girlfriend: six adults at various stages of exhaustion.
Rather than planning the family’s usual weeklong road trip to somewhere like Niagara Falls or Maine, or repeating a cruise they had taken to Bermuda, Hastings set a different brief for herself. Everyone needed their own bed and enough space to decompress. She wanted on-site activities so the group would not spend the holiday ferrying between attractions. And she deliberately avoided tourist-heavy areas, reasoning that too many nearby draws would recreate the busyness she was trying to escape.
The destination she settled on was still within Connecticut. Before the family arrived, she sent a group text covering sleeping arrangements, meal expectations, and cleanup duties. Getting that out of the way in advance, she wrote, prevented arguments on arrival.
What followed was deliberately low-key. The family cooked burgers, ate watermelon, and played volleyball in the pool. Her son caught two bass in the pond. Hastings finished a book she had been putting off. They played pool, threw darts, and learnt shuffleboard in the game room. On the last evening, they sat around a bonfire roasting s’mores with, as she put it, ‘no deep conversation, just laughter and the comfortable feeling of being together.’
What Made It Work
The family did leave the property each day, mostly for ice cream or coffee. They drove through woods and farms, found a hike with a river to swim in, and ate out once: takeout calzones at a picnic table by the horse farm at the UConn Department of Animal Science. That farm, on Horsebarn Hill at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, is open to visitors daily from 10am to 4pm and houses approximately 70 horses, over 200 Holstein and Jersey cows, 50 brood ewes, 45 mature beef cattle, and 800 poultry. For families with younger children especially, a stop there costs nothing beyond the drive.
The UConn campus also sits a short distance from the UConn Dairy Bar on Horsebarn Hill Road Extension, which draws a steady stream of visitors for its farm-made ice cream. Groups of ten or more are asked to contact the Dairy Bar in advance.
Connecticut itself offers a range of options for this kind of deliberately low-key break. Visit Connecticut lists farm stays, lakeside rentals, and quiet river corridors that are easy to reach from most parts of New England. The state’s trail network, managed in part by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, includes dozens of riverside hikes of the sort Hastings’s family stumbled across.
Short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb have made it straightforward to find properties with the specific mix Hastings was after: enough bedrooms for a large group, a games room, a pool, and outdoor water access, all without committing to a week in a resort area.
Hastings admitted she worried beforehand that staying so close to home would not feel like a real holiday. She kept reassuring her family, and herself, that rest was the point. The anxiety proved unfounded. When she asked every family member on the way home whether they would do it again, every one of them said yes.
‘Before the trip, I worried a vacation one hour from home wouldn’t feel like a real vacation,’ she wrote. ‘By the end, I realized distance had very little to do with it. What made it perfect wasn’t where we went. It was that for a few days, nobody had anywhere they needed to be.’
The real test will come next spring, when the family’s schedules begin pulling in different directions again. If everyone answered yes once, the question is whether a one-hour drive becomes the default rather than the compromise.