The Art of the Day-Cation: Weighing the Balance of One-Day Escapes

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By the time mid-July arrives, facebook, instagram, and conversations are often filled with the logistics of grand summer travel. We see the photos of packed suitcases, long airport lines, and beautiful Airbnbs. It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that the only way to truly rest, reset, and experience the magic of summer is to pack up your life and head hundreds of miles away for a week.

There is an alternative: the day-cation.

A day-cation is a dedicated, single-day outing—whether it’s a morning picnic at a quiet regional beach, a slow afternoon browsing antique shops in a nearby historic town, or a day hike in a state park. You leave in the morning with an adventurous spirit, and you return home that evening to the comfort of your own pillow.

Some of my sweetest family memories revolve around our one-day outings. The day we drove up into the mountains to visit a Bavarian-inspired town, and it turned out to be the weekend of the apple festival. We all enjoyed bratwurst, strudel, and a marching band streaming down the main street. 

Or, the family birthday when we took a long ferry ride out to one of the islands in the Sound, and we were entertained by the antics of several sea critters en route. 

And not to forget, one spring day when we visited the tulip fields, and I was able to get all of the family on board with looking at flowers for a day. Now that’s a feat!

Like any lifestyle strategy, choosing a series of day-cations over one grand vacation comes with a unique set of balances. Let me share both sides of the ledger.

The Merits: Why Day-Cations Feel Like True Luxury

• The Huge Budget Win: A longer vacation is costly. The lodging, transportation, and meals out over multiple days gets expensive. In contrast, a day-cation has no lodging expense, a smaller transportation cost, and it’s possible to bring all of the food we could want for the day packed in a picnic basket and cooler. The plain truth is we need time away more often than our budget allows. We can afford an "away" vacation once per year or two years. But a day-cation can happen at any point in the budget.
• Zero Travel Friction: Planning a longer vacation takes time and energy, often weeks of checking fares, researching hotels, making packing lists, and of course that initial travel day can be brutal. A day-cation generally requires planning around one venue. It’s a lot easier to look up the ferry schedule and parking at our one-day destination than to track prices, book a hotel, airfare, and transportation at a miles-away destination. A day-cation can be as simple as checking the weather for the day and saying “let’s do it!”
• Coming Home to Comfort: Sleeping in strange beds for many nights compromises sleep quality. We all do better when we can sleep in our own beds, which we appreciate at the end of a day-cation. 
• Timing Is Everything: A long vacation in summer comes at the exact wrong time for my family. Our garden is in full swing, so we would miss the fresh produce. I also wouldn’t be around to tend the garden and do the watering. It could jeopardize some of our harvest that we depend upon for the fall and winter months. In addition, summer is the most beautiful time of the year where we live. We have 9 ugly months and just 3 beautiful ones. Going away in summer just doesn’t make sense.
• Eating Without Repercussions: On our 5-day vacation to California in winter, I struggled a bit to find foods that worked for me and the others. 5 days of sourcing eating possibilities which could meet my allergies and intolerances. Again, here’s an area of bringing our own food that really works for me. We usually bring a picnic lunch composed entirely of homemade foods that I can eat.
• The Power of Anticipation: Instead of waiting all year for one single week of freedom, a series of day-cations spreads the joy across the entire summer. We can do two or three distinct "mini-vacations" scattered throughout July and August, keeping the entire season feeling fresh and abundant.

The Flip Side: The Unavoidable Drawbacks

• The Temptation of the Familiar: Because we begin our day at home and end it also at home, there’s the temptation to do just one load of laundry before heading out, or water just the pumpkin patch, or do that one kitchen cleaning chore. You don’t fully disconnect from home life the way you do when you jet away to a distant venue.
• The Geographic Limit: Taking a day-cation means going someplace sort of nearby, perhaps 2 hours away. If we’re really wanting to get out of our area, into a better weather situation, or experience a different culture, that’s not going to happen 2 hours from our front door.
• Countdown to Time’s Up: As a day-cation happens all in one day, there’s a sort of internal countdown clock that begins to tick away sometime midday while on our fun escapade. We are keenly aware that at the end of this day, the “trip” is over, and we’ll be making the drive home in just a handful of hours. We can’t linger over a lovely sunset or stay for the evening concert in the park if we know we still have a ferry to catch followed by a long drive back to our humble abode. There is a sense that it ends all too soon.

Making This Work When I Still Have to Do My Work

Since a day-cation is a sort of a whirlwind event for us, my energy is spent by the time we get back home. One of the things I do to counter this is prepare a meal in advance, something like sandwiches, carrot sticks, and watermelon wedges, then pop it all into the fridge. When we walk in the door and drop the picnic cooler, I pull out our pre-made dinner. We get that nice and peaceful meal before hitting the hay. I also try to do a thorough garden-watering the day before our excursion, so I can skip watering when we return without fear of wilting plants. As for packing the picnic lunch and jugs of iced tea and lemonade to bring along for the day, I enlist all of my family to help in this work. Spreading out the work amongst all of us makes my job just a little easier.

Finding rest and rejuvenation this summer is all about choosing the option that provides what we need for the least burden. For my family, choosing a series of one-day escapes meets our financial and practical restrictions while offering many of the benefits of a traditional multi-day summer vacation. It’s a wonderfully sustainable choice for us. It also reminds us that adventure isn’t only in far away locales. It can be found an hour down the road, if we make the time to reach out for it.

Your Turn: I would love to hear how you are finding your rest this summer! How do you feel about day-cations?  Do you get that feeling of rejuvenation from a day outing? Or, do you find that you need to physically leave your house behind to truly relax?

Reverse Engineering the Grocery Store: My Sweet and Tangy Kale Salad Using What I Have on Hand

We all agree that using what you have on hand is about the most budget-friendly way to feed yourself. Well, here's a salad that is refreshing, flavorful, and uses only ingredients I already have at home or buy on a regular basis.

Kale is known to have a bitter taste in summer, but sweetens after the first frost. My family has a favorite way to eat it in the heat of summer while bypassing bitter taste -- Sweet and Tangy Kale Salad.

Easy Sweet and Tangy Kale Salad

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients (per serving):

2 to 3 large kale leaves per serving

1 tablespoon nuts or seeds per serving

1 1/2 tablespoons dried fruit, such as Craisins or raisins, per serving

1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons jam per serving

1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons oil per serving

1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons vinegar per serving

dash salt and black pepper

pinch orange zest (optional)

I start with several leaves of kale from the garden. Once they're washed and patted dry, I shred them into 1/4-inch widths. No worry about toughness or need to massage the kale.

The delectable dressing uses 1 part jam, 1 part, oil, and about 1 1/2 parts vinegar (I've used chive blossom vinegar here, but any vinegar will work), and a dash each of salt and pepper.

I mix the dressing directly in the bowl before adding the greens and add-ins.

In addition to the kale, I toss in about 1 tablespoon nuts or seeds (sliced almonds, roasted sunflower seeds, or pepita seeds) per serving, and about 1 1/2 tablespoons dried fruit (dried cranberries are prettiest, but I also use raisins if that's all I have, like today). If I feel like a little citrus twist, I toss in a little orange zest.

Mix together, and that's it! A colorful, nutritious, and delicious salad.

The sweet and tangy dressing is delicious on spinach salads, any dark green-fruit-nut salad, and red cabbage slaws in the fall.

For the orange zest — I buy a couple of organic oranges in winter. I shave the zest off with a vegetable peeler, then finely mince. Stored in the freezer, I have orange zest to use all year.

Shopping for Inspiration, Not Products

Sweet Kale Chopped Salad Kit at Fred Meyer

I was first inspired to make this salad at home by a salad kit I saw in the store (Fred Meyer). Browsing the salad kits, produce trays, and deli sections at the store is an excellent strategy for finding new ways to use ingredients you already have at home. You could say that these sections of the grocery store are a free look-book for inspiration.

When I see an appealing salad kit or tasty-looking deli salad, I don’t pull out my wallet. Instead I read the ingredient list on the back of the package. I study the flavor combinations, look at the textures, and then head right back home to my own kitchen and garden to recreate it using what I already have on hand.

My home-prepared kale salad cost about 70 cents to make 2 servings (35 cents/serving), including the cost of growing my own kale, all of the dressing ingredients, and the add-ins of raisins and almonds. If I were to buy a kale salad kit, my cost would be $4.99 for 3.5 servings at Fred Meyer ($1.42/serving). My version isn’t an exact dupe, but still saved me over $1 per serving for something very similar.

Salad kits are very convenient, and definitely have a place. I use them when we're having guests, and I want to have an easy kitchen job for a guest to handle. A salad kit is self-explanatory and busies my guest while I'm putting the finishing touches on everything.

The true luxury of a salad like this isn't just the fresh, crisp crunch; it’s the financial victory. By bypassing the plastic bag salad kits and the deli counter, and instead using our backyard harvest and basic pantry staples, a giant bowl of gourmet greens costs us next to nothing. It teaches us to look at the grocery store with a critic's eye—turning their expensive convenience ideas into our own thrifty, everyday masterpieces.

Your Turn: I would love to hear how you find inspiration for your daily meals! Have you ever tried to recreate a favorite restaurant dish, a grocery store deli salad, or a frozen meal at home from scratch? Do you ever reverse-engineer a convenience food item to try and match a store-bought flavor at home? Please share your tips in the comments!