How to Take the Perfect Time Out with Your Family on Holiday
Life can make it hard to be together with your loved ones.
Your timetables don’t line up. You are constantly running from one appointment to the next. You have meetings at school, sports practices, coffee with friends, and play dates for your children.
Life just gets in the way of spending quality time with the ones you love.
It’s a shame that we can be so busy that we ignore what’s really important right in front of us. That’s why you need to take a break sometimes to get away from the busy-ness of life.
You need a holiday to restore that quality family time with those that are most important.
The Break of a Holiday
A holiday is a chance to step outside your normal life, to take a break from all the things we ‘think’ are so important. A holiday to somewhere like the Costa Brava in Spain allows you to remember that, although life does get busy, we all need a chance to remember what truly matters: the family around us.
Shared Accommodation
When you decide to take a break with your family, where will you stay? Will you try to get a few rooms in a hotel? Maybe you could find an adjoining room, but if not, maybe you can all stay in the same building?
If you’re travelling during a busy season, the chances of finding rooms on the same floor, much less the same hotel, can be slim to none.
Why not try sharing accommodation? Let’s say you’re travelling to Barcelona, and you’d like to find a place for you all to stay. You can easily find a private villa that allows the entire family to stay in one place while you’re holidaying and reconnecting with your family.
Too expensive, you say? Hardly. Sharing a private residence is among the best ways to save money and one of the most recommended ways to make your money go further while on holiday.
You also get to connect with everyone in the privacy of your own place. You don’t need to beat the crowds to make a reservation, or fight the other hotel guests for a spot at the pool. You can simply serve dinner in your private house while the family swim in their own pool. It’s a delightful refuge for the whole party.
Common Experiences
One of the best ways to connect with people is to share a common experience. If you travel with your family, you can bond over an excursion into the vineyards outside Malaga or the beaches of Mallorca or Ibiza.
When you have a common experience with the ones you love, you build trust and reaffirm the bonds that make your family. You can spend time doing something that some of the family loves, and then swap to another activity that other members enjoy.
Common experiences give you something to talk about that night over dinner and something new to learn about the people you live with on a daily basis.
And, because you’re on holiday, you can enjoy the free time that you have together by actually doing activities that everyone can participate in. How often does that happen in your normal lives? And even if you could schedule some quality time with the whole family, you’d have to schedule it months in advance. A holiday makes these common experiences easy to plan.
Creating Memories
If there is one thing that will bond you all together, it’s the memories that you’ll create.
If you have a wonderful meal, a great time at the beach or some funny incident on your holiday, you’ll create a lasting memory that you can all recall and enjoy together. Some of the best times to spend with your family are when you reminisce about your holiday after it’s happened.
‘Remember that time when Uncle Brent fell into the pool after telling his joke?’
‘Or how about the time that Jodi thought she was eating a green bean when it was a chilli pepper? Her face turned so red!’
Sharing these memories creates a lasting impression that endures for longer than the week or two you spend on holiday. When you get home, remember to take the time to sit down and look at some of the photos that you took on holiday. It will be a good way to bring back those feelings of closeness and appreciation that you all got from being together for this moment in time.
A holiday does end at some point, but that doesn’t mean your quality time has to end as well. Creating lasting memories keeps that feeling of togetherness going for many months afterwards.
Holidays are just what you need right now to make time to be with each other. They don’t have to be luxurious or long. You can spend just a week together and still have a wonderful time reconnecting with the most important parts of your life. Isn’t that worth it?
