Got distracted by minibreaks
I spend a lot of time searching for a perfect escape from New York City. I’ve been doing this for years. How many hours have I spent reading lists of hidden gem hotels and small towns and beaches, Airbnb and Tripadvisor reviews .... dozens? I’ve only actually booked one of these obsessed-over minibreaks, the result of having time, money and circumstance line up, finally. We went to Fire Island in July. It was, miraculously, perfect.
But finding perfection hasn’t stopped my search for more. In the past few days, the search has been for a last-minute Labor Day weekend getaway. It’s actually a terrible time to get out of town, since everyone else is also getting out of town. Much better to stay in town, since it’ll be quiet. But the sirens of minibreak possibility called, and with it the magical thinking that this time, this search, will be different.
Despite years of evidence otherwise, each search begins with the hypothesis that there must be a nearby property accessible by train where I can book a last-minute apartment or bungalow or room with a view. What I’m looking for is what everyone is looking for: A perfect setup. It’s near the ocean, or maybe a river or bay, or maybe just some nice trees. It’s nestled in a little town with a coffee shop and a restaurant and grocery, maybe a few of each. It’s accessible by public transportation and walkable once you’re there. In recent years the ideal situation has grown to include a very nice yoga studio nearby, but that’s not for me.
I’ll pick a few towns and look for boutique hotels. These always cost more than I want to pay, but I check them anyway. Then I use the Airbnb app, which is basically useless if your criteria is “somewhere not here, but close,” and not “this specific place.” So I use the map feature, zooming in and out along the coast and routes out of the city.
The fantasy is doable if one’s budget is infinite. Not even infinite: $400-$500 a night. If you can spend $2,000 on a weekend away, then you can set up most kinds of scenarios, even at the last minute. It’s only when you’re trying to keep things cheap that a minibreak becomes a mission.
Part of the problem is that I want a minibreak to cost less than a minibreak actually costs. I think that a person should be able to spend a couple hundred dollars and get out of the city for a night or two. This seems sane and logical to me. If we all had dachas, or friends with dachas, it would be totally doable. But without dachas, the math doesn’t work. As a young person, it did work, sometimes. I had friends in Hudson, New Paltz, Beacon. I could get out to see them easily, take the cheapest transportation options, sleep on couches. But now we’re older, we all need space.
As I said, I’ve succeeded once with the self-made minibreak. I found the one Airbnb on Fire Island under $300 per night that lets you book for two nights only. It was a small garden level apartment, and though normally a basement would not do, this one looked out onto a verdant hill so one could see leaves and trees from the bed. There was a patio outside for dining, and it was three houses down from the beach, along a boardwalk. With transportation (a train, bus, and a ferry), we paid $722, for two nights away, plus silly money for groceries. But an exhaustive search confirmed that it was the cheapest possible weekend away that met the criteria, and we really wanted to get out of town. We lucked out finding this little apartment; it’s perpetually booked. I know because I check most weeks, hoping for a cancellation. I’d empty my checking account to go again.
This weekend, we’re staying home. After a few days of searching, I gave up, decided to save my last-minute minibreak energy and money for another favorite pastime: searching for the ideal spot for a week-long vacation abroad, an even more complicated mission.
And so this weekend we’ll walk to a coffee shop in the mornings. We might go to our favorite restaurant one night, if we time it right. We will get gelato and walk to the river and sit on the pier and watch the currents, get more coffee and sit in the park and watch the men playing soccer, listen to their banter. Maybe we’ll see a film up the road, or go to the cheese shop and get whatever we want. One of us will start to add up our weekend expenditures and joke that we could have left town for this money, but we couldn’t have. It’ll be very nice; we live in a nice place. But it’s nice to get out of town, sometimes, even for a thousand dollars.
Watercolor by Matt Davis