A friend of mine just came home from her summer vacation and told me she was exhausted. She’d been driving for hours every day, and the mental effort of deciding where to eat and what to do in unfamiliar places had been tiring, too. I joked that needing a vacation to recover from your vacation is an American cliché. She said, “You know what? It was very pretty where we were, but not that different from what we could have seen at home.” When she told me the details, I realized this was true. My friend lives within an hour’s drive of the Atlantic coast in an area that has nice beaches and wineries and lighthouses. She had just driven a long way and spent a lot of money to go to a different part of the Atlantic coast that also has nice beaches and wineries and lighthouses. We both had to laugh.
Our conversation reminded me of a piece I wrote for KOM in 2025 about going to a national park very near my house, which I’d failed to visit for years precisely because I knew I could go anytime. I started to think: What if we all made a point of seeing the tourist sites that are day trips for us first, before we planned vacations further afield? We could probably all save a lot of stress, gas and money.
Here are a few suggestions, in case you’d like to try this, too:
- Check out the website for America’s national parks and see which ones are near you.
- Look at this list of US state parks in all fifty states, and see if there are some in your state or adjacent states that could be a fun day trip.
- Investigate offbeat sites in your region with the crowdsourced Atlas Obscura of unusual attractions.
- Investigate the National Register of Historic Places to see interesting destinations related to your region’s past.
