HOLIDAY HEALING
Start planning your next trip… it’s good for you!
Australians in full-time employment are entitled to four weeks annual paid leave. However, a recent Roy Morgan survey reveals that we have accumulated 123,510,000 unused annual leave days. Don’t we like paid holidays!?
Separate results from the National Relaxation Survey reveal that Gen X and Gen Y actually feel guilty about relaxing (so much for them being the “lazy” generations), and that twothirds who took annual leave completed one or more work-related tasks while on their break.
Having just taken a two-week holiday myself, I get it. I knew that to take time off, I’d have to work doubly hard in the months leading up to the holiday, and that I’d need to get my team to work harder and adjust their schedules, too. They did, by the way, for which I am very grateful.
Other people say they don’t take holidays because they are frightened of how much work they’ll have to catch up on when they get back, or that workplace politics will see them usurped. Some people like to store up their annual leave to use for added days off, family emergencies or to accrue entitlement payouts when they leave a job.
All this is bad news for everyone. Without proper holidays, we don’t give our minds and bodies a chance to de-stress, to reset and re-energise. It’s bad for our mental health and can contribute to long-term fatigue and career burnout.
My recent break did me the world of good. My partner and I travelled to Amsterdam for Canal Pride – which we missed because of an unexpected 24-hour delay in Singapore on the way. However, we joined the Hermes Holidays’ Queen Of The Rhine trip from Amsterdam to Frankfurt – a bunch of gays and mates floating past gorgeous German castles, stopping for Riesling tastings and sight-seeing, bike riding tours, and partying onboard and off.
All fun and relaxing, but the best aspect of the trip, for me, was meeting tons of fabulous new people. I love new people, hearing their stories, their jokes, discovering their quirks and their life challenges. When you travel you are inevitably thrown together with strangers, but new experiences with new people is quickly bonding. We made new friends with people from around the world, and social media makes it easy to stay in touch.
But we also made friends with people who literally live a block from us! Yes, we travelled around the world to meet our neighbours.
That’s the beauty of travel and the value of taking a holiday! So, if one of those 123,510,000 days are yours, start planning on how best to use them. This is DNA’s travel issue so there are a few great suggestions in the following pages. On page 58-59 you’ll see some pictures from the Queen Of The Rhine trip and find some info on Hermes Holiday’s next big gay tour – The Gay Armada off the Croatian coast in 2020. It looks amazing!
We go to extremes this issue: from the frozen wonder of Iceland to the warm waters of Hawaii, from the urban sophistication of Berlin to paragliding over Slovenia. I trust you’ll enjoy all these stories. (And start planning your next holiday. Really. Do!)
For me, but the best aspect of the trip was meeting tons of fabulous new people.