Columnist Kate Monson employs her powers of persuasion to encourage you to enjoy a staycation this summer. Creativity, connectivity and new points of view can all be yours when you simply stay still for a while.
The summer holidays are fast approaching and perhaps you’ve already planned your jet-setting trip somewhere tropical… But if not I’d like to spend the next few hundred words encouraging you to consider a sizzling staycation in splendid Skåne!
I’m not going to waste much time boring you with carbon calculations in order to guilt trip you into spending your summer holidays a little closer to home. Most of us have heard it all before of course. But I will say one thing, according to Travel Nav’s flight emissions calculator, a return plane trip between Malmö and Barcelona racks up just under half a tonne of carbon emissions, per person. That 6 hours of travel – spent breathing fake air full of other people’s germs while your ears pop with the altitude – has the same sized carbon footprint as an average Senegalese over a whole year.
But there’s far more to a good staycation than carbon-saving. Stepping out of the fast lane of the flight path encourages creativity, closer connections and new points of view – both literally and metaphorically.
The moment you stop assuming you will fly to your destination you realise there’s a multitude of different ways to move from A to B. Train, bus and bicycle are some of the obvious options. But what about hitchhiking? Canoeing? Or even, as this lady chose, a donkey? Or perhaps you get rid of the idea of ‘B’ being the destination all together and instead savour the stretch of space and time that comes between the two?
It’s also worth pondering why we so many of us feel we must go far far away from home to really relax. Of course, the daily drudge of school work and grocery shopping that take us along the same roads at more or less the same time of day, almost every day, drains even the most buoyant of us eventually. But isn’t the place you call home worth investing a bit of time into? Proper time. Enjoyable time. Holiday time. Get under it’s skin. Look around it’s corners. Connect with the physical place that sustains you. In a world spinning so ferociously fast, simply staying still is harder – but far more rewarding – than it sounds.
So, if you are planning on spending your summer in Skåne – or close by – here are a few tips to ensure your staycation seriously sizzles:
- Get a Jojo Summer Card and Skåne becomes your oyster with unlimited travel between 15th June and 15th August
- Switch off your smart phone
- Be spontaneous
- Put ideas for places to go, things to do, sights to see in a hat and pick one at random whenever you want some inspiration
- Take a look at my earlier column – I’ll take a triple – which is full of tips for good times in Lund, Malmo and Copenhagen
- Explore
