Savour the return of the two-week holiday

If there’s one thing a year of restrictions has taught Anna Hart, it’s how to get to know a place

To the ears of a millennial traveller like myself, nothing sounds more alien than a two-week holiday. Whether we are talking about a backto-nature camping trip in the Scottish Highlands, a relaxing stay at a French gîte, island-hopping in Thailand or a ranch stay in Arizona, going to one place for two whole weeks always seemed an outlandish concept to me. Who has the money, the time and the attention span for that?

Instead, I bought into the idea of visiting as many places as I possibly could. Sometimes this meant a short twonight trip to Marrakech, or a (retrospectively ridiculous) three-night Kenyan safari. For years, a fashion editor friend lectured me about my “manic Spartan” approach to holidays. “Darling, your transport:holiday ratio is way off,” she purred, serenely, as I popped another Pro Plus to help battle my way through transatlantic jet lag. “You’re missing the real holiday. That happens after the first week.” I didn’t listen.

However, after one whole year of embracing alien concepts – curfews, Zoom quizzes, border closures, no hugs, face masks – rethinking my policy on two-week holidays is coming easily. Because when I finally do manage to get away, and gather my family members or friends together in one place, there is no way I’m departing after three nights. Nope. Whether I’m in the UK or abroad, my first holiday with other people will feel like a hard-won right, a cherished privilege, an administrative triumph over adversity, a logistical miracle… and a fabulous celebration. I intend to savour every moment, and I want a lot of those moments to savour. And so a two-week trip no longer seems like a stretch, of my budget, my allocated holiday days and my equanimity.

Certainly, this is a financially precarious time for most of us, myself included. But I’ve hardly had a profligate year. It wasn’t possible to have a profligate year. Profligates were completely out of luck in 2020. So I feel I can justifiably stretch my holiday budget for summer 2021. This is one splurge I expect my finance department (yes, ’tis I) will sign off with a flourish of the pen. The HR department (also me) are unlikely to raise objections either. I’m self-employed, but having not really taken a break since a week in Wales last September with my parents, I feel like I can give myself a decent break this summer. This also applies to plenty of key workers, like my brother, Pete, an ICU doctor, who has accrued a lot of holiday days he hasn’t been able to take.

And the past year has functioned as an enormous, nationwide experiment

in remote working, which opens up the possibility of longer getaways to many employees. Obviously this doesn’t apply to every profession, but it’s fair to say that British working patterns will not be the same again.

So, yes, I finally have the time and money for a two-week holiday. But even more significantly, my threshold for boredom has completely changed. A year of lockdowns has taught me to savour the more nuanced and muted pleasures of staying in one place. To my lockdown-acclimatised mind, there will surely be so much to explore and enjoy and experience in any new surrounding.

I also want to drink up every moment with my shiny new travel companions, people I have not shared a household with for much of the past year.

Right now, the thought of spending just two nights somewhere as spectacularly exotic as Andalucia seems faintly barbaric, culturally disrespectful to Seville, mildly masochistic in terms of travel logistics, and strangely antisocial regarding my travel companions. I now cannot imagine getting “bored” in one Turkish city, or at one Croatian beach resort.

Of course, longer and less frequent holidays were very much the norm just a couple of decades ago. As a child, my parents would take us from Belfast to Brittany by ferry for camping holidays, and the faff and expense of getting three small children to the campsite meant we didn’t budge for a fortnight. Before budget airlines really took off (pun intended), international fights were a major investment, and one longhaul trip a year was quite a big deal. So perhaps we are just returning to this more sedate, simple and practical travel mentality. Perhaps the changing travel landscape is not about restrictions, but about a revival.

i Spin it out: spending just two nights in exotic Seville seems ‘faintly barbaric’