Three and Four Day Weekends: Planning the Perfect Quick Escape

3 Day Weekends

[00:00:00] Narrator: Do you dream about your next trip? You're in the right place. On the Time to Talk Travel Podcast, we come to you weekly to share places to go and what to do when you get there. Let's dive into this week's adventure.

[00:00:16] Nasreen: Welcome to another episode of Time to Talk Travel. We are here today to talk about three day weekends because there are quite a few of them coming up. You want to take advantage of them, but then sometimes people try to do too much. There's a delicate balance to a good three day weekend to make sure that you're not regretful that you traveled or tried to.

Let's run through some of the tips, tricks, and horrible mistakes that we may have made in relation to three day weekends and whether they are worth it or not.

know.

[00:00:53] Desiree:Can we stretch it to three and four day

[00:00:55] Nasreen: Sure, I'll give you an extra day

[00:00:57] Desiree:you know what, I did have a job where I worked from home and quite often on my three day weekends, the boss would say around lunch, you can go ahead on out. And so that would stretch it. If you can get away with that, where you leave work a little early, maybe two or three o'clock , because getting there and then being there, waking up in the new place for the three day weekend gives you a little more time.

I love these. These are almost my favorite kinds of vacations instead of week long or two week long,

because it's

just enough to make you feel like you escaped

normalcy. You know, you got away, you got a change of scenery. I love this stuff. So I say take them whatever opportunity you get.

Go, go, go, go, go.

[00:01:37] Ciaran: I totally agree with that, but I also totally stress out about the three day and even four day weekends. It's like you said, Nas, if you try and do too much, there's so much that can go wrong. I love the idea of being a last minute seat of your pants traveler. But I have experienced, when you don't get out early enough and you don't make a reservation. And I have stories about this, but we can talk about more later.

[00:02:05] Nasreen: The other big question is, I like the three day weekends. I think that I do have reservations about how worth it is sometimes. We use them. A lot of times my husband and I will go away and that's how long we can leave the kids in the charge of the oldest who's above 18 and my parents are nearby and know that things can work out and there's no school to juggle.

Right? So that's kind of where the three-day weekends are for us right now. And I think one of the biggest things for weekends is do you drive or do you fly? Because now with all these issues with delays and flight cancellations. I never thought twice about jumping on a one hour, two hour flight before, but now it could tank the whole weekend.

And then, do you really want to be in a car for four or five hours to start off a three day weekend? So I'll let y'all vote on that one.

[00:02:57] Desiree:I wasn't even thinking about the getting there, but the coming home part, that's where it gets dicey. Because if it's late Sunday night and you're taking that last flight out in order to stretch your time as much as possible. And then you get to the airport for that 10 p. m. flight and it's delayed or canceled. You're explaining to your boss the next day, sorry. I mean, I always traveled with my computer just because I had a virtual job. So if I did get stuck, I could be working from wherever I was stuck. But it's a whole other animal if you're going to the office sorry, boss.

I think these days it's much safer if it's going to be a quick trip to make it a drive. For me , I say it's gotta be less than five hours, but I've done the three day weekends for eight and a half hour trips just to go give my mom a hug. My boyfriend has a term is the juice worth the squeeze. And he'll say that juice ain't worth the squeeze, but it is for me. It's relative. I don't know, Ciaran, how about you?

[00:03:54] Ciaran: I have done nine hour drives. My daughter's in Zion right now, that's a nine hour drive. and she's come home for the weekend and we have plans to spend the weekend. But for me, it's really about making sure certain variables are within my control.

So that means is there going to be a place to stay at the end of that nine hour drive? Am I sure that I'm going to have somewhere I can crash? And doing a lot of the time consuming, Things like, finding a pet sitter and packing. And for me, I always have to have gluten free food, making sure I have that bag of groceries ready to go.

All these little things. that take time, that can just take a bite out of your precious, precious getaway time, making sure that those are all kind of tucked away and taken care of before we go. Then I can relax and I love to do the getaways. But I have experience where it's a Friday afternoon and it's a three day weekend.

We're like, hey, let's go somewhere. And by the time we figure out where we're going, where we're staying and do the packing and do the shopping. It's Saturday afternoon and then there's traffic and the whole weekend just turns into an exercise in frustration. So I'm all for it. Just do the planning.

[00:05:06] Nasreen: Yep. We've started and I guess I'm leading the charge on it. When I see interesting places I'm storing them on a list. I've got some Google maps going, I've got some pins dropped. My problem is the decision making at the last minute and weighing, cause I want to know things about it.

And so then if I start researching, it's one of the reasons why I don't say, Oh, you know, we have a long weekend. Let's stay home and go to a couple different places because then I have to find the places and I'm going to go down a rabbit hole, it's going to be bad. Having a couple of cute towns or areas that, you know, are a couple hours away from you that you want to hit up.

I know I sent you guys the video on the town in New York that has all the bookstores. It's not that far from me. So one of these weekends. It's in the mountains. That's a nice drive. I go to a bunch of bookstores. It's all good. Everyone in my family will be happy. So knowing a couple of different places that you can go at the drop of the hat, and I think the other challenge for me is the crowd thing knowing it won't be Joining 80, 000 of your closest friends on this getaway weekend.

I'd rather just stay home and hide inside.

[00:06:07] Desiree:Yeah, I'm more people y. If there's a big festival or something , as long as I know I can get a room. This weekend, this will air after, but it's Labor Day weekend. I just got back from a trip where I was gone for 8 days, and, It's kind of killing me that I'm not going anywhere for Labor Day. I'm afraid I'm parked for this weekend, but I'm already looking at, okay, then the next weekend, maybe I can go to New York city. I love the quick little trips.

It doesn't stress me out like it does Ciaran.

Hearing her talk about it is stressing me out. Oh my gosh, I don't even think about all the 50 things that can go wrong. I'm thinking about what's going to go right. This is going to be such a blast, you know? So we should probably level each other out.

[00:06:46] Nasreen: Well, and I think it's funny because

I would sit there and go, okay, well, if I went to this rando town in the middle of nowhere, like Western mass in the Berkshires

that would be where I would sit there and go, Oh, there's going to be a ton of people I can't get in a restaurant.

I get grumpy when I don't eat. I need to know I'm going to be able to eat. However, a

spontaneous three day trip to New York, Boston, \ cities, I'm fine with them. I can find somewhere I'll figure it out. I know them. I know I can get around. I know there's a bunch of exit strategies. If the plane goes wrong, I’ve got a train. If worse comes to worse, I can drive back. It's the options for me. Maybe. I just like to know that there's a lot of contingency plans.

[00:07:24] Ciaran: I would say I'm the same. I like to know that there's a lot of contingency plans. I've just been bitten by spontaneous trips. When we lived in Portland, we decided to go to Seattle for the weekend, and there's a big convention, literally not a single hotel room in Seattle, so then we decided to go to Vancouver. And we ended up having a great time. Curveballs can be a challenge when you have a very limited amount of time. So I just want to plan ahead for them. I'm not thinking what can go wrong. I'm not that negative.

[00:07:52] Desiree:I don't know.

Is there one that really stands out for you guys? One three or four day weekend that you took that was just, wow, I'm so glad I went?

[00:08:01] Ciaran: Yes.

[00:08:04] Desiree:did that for my birthday a couple of years ago. It was the welcome home concert. I saw CBS Sunday morning, they had a preview of it.

And I thought, Oh man, that's like 30 groups that I want to see all performing on one weekend. Happens to be my birthday, New York's great. So we went and it turned out there was a hurricane in New York, like of all places, who would predict in her. So it got rained out. We got into the first hour and a half of it.

And then before Bruce Springsteen, who I really wanted to go see, hit the stage. It was a downpour and lightning, but we had so much fun. We just walked around the streets of New York. It poured, just wet rats, , and found little bars, holes in the wall that we'd just stop in. That's one of my favorite memories.

It's still one of my favorite trips. Is there one you guys think of?

[00:08:53] Ciaran: There's so many for me, last fall we went to Tahoe though and it was really beautiful. It is a good eight hour drive to get there but it just went really smoothly and we had a great time. place to stay. And we did so much in those three days. I think that's like one of the beauties of a three day trip is how much you can squeeze into three days. It really makes you feel like you've lived a month, you know, in a weekend. That's one of the interesting things about travel is that your brain registers new experiences as taking more time or just living more. So when you do travel, even if it's for a short time, it's like you've lived a lot more than if you stayed home.

[00:09:36] Nasreen: We've had a lot of great three day weekends. . I mean, New York for me is another one. Greg used to travel a lot with me when I was business traveling before all the kids came along when it was just Ryan and so he used to come along on trips and we used to stay for the weekend.

And so Madison, Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Minnesota, a lot of cities. Again, I like there to be a concentration of things to do and explore. We've done Seattle for long weekends before. I love a three day weekend in a city. Because it gets quieter.

A lot of times you can find really good deals on hotels near financial districts. That's my hack for the three day weekend city style. And generally the restaurants in that area are not as busy to get into either. We venture out to the busier areas, come back and then we have no problem popping out somewhere to get food.

[00:10:27] Desiree:See, I think of three day weekends as more of the go to the places you wouldn't otherwise hit. In Georgia, we have Blue Ridge Mountains and Ellijay , or you can run off to the beach for a three or four day weekend. It's a five and a half hour drive to get to the coast here, so it's not a quick little run over. That's another one you really do have to leave. I'm a get up at 4 AM and drive so that we're there at eight or nine. And you can't check into a hotel that early. So it's go into the hotel bathroom, change into your bathing suits, go make it a beach day, all day until we can get in our rooms. I guess that's my number one thing is, go early , we did that quite a bit when we had the kids. My kids are all out of the house now, so it's so much easier for me to just decide, Hey, I want to go. I don't have pets now. I do have flowers, but they're orchids. They only need to be watered once a week. It is so easy for me to just say I'm out. It is one of the best parts about being an empty nester. I will say that. Especially if you've got reward miles, or hotel reward points where you don't have to pay for it.

Redeem some of those reward points.

[00:11:32] Ciaran: I'm in a weird position right now because we are renting a beach house and for the very first time in my life, I don't actually want to go anywhere. I don't want to miss a single sunset. So you guys are going to have to plan a three day weekend where you come and visit me and go to the beach. Because I'm like, why would I leave? I think I may be going away to see the fall leaves a couple of times this season, but I am so happy to spend a three day weekend at home for the first time ever.

[00:12:02] Desiree:I think that's amazing. I think that's great. And that's, I think that's really important for people to understand. A lot of people see travel as, oh, it's because you don't like your own life and you're running away from something. I don't feel that way at all. I don't have your view either. Ciaran does have the best. Right now. And I only hope she can stay there the rest of her life. I fully intend to go there. I fully intend to, so we'll be knocking on the door. But I think that's important too. Even if you love where you are, just a change in scenery every now and then is a nice thing.

I have friends who despise travel because they see it as nothing but a pain in the butt. There's all the headaches, all the things that can go wrong, and I just think a change in attitude, a change in perspective, a change in scenery, all of the above are really good for the soul, or at least for my soul.

And I'm a homebody, believe it or not. I, yeah,

[00:12:56] Nasreen: Okay, so for the three day weekend, do you plan things that you are going to do at certain times or do you just wing it? Because I think there's two people.

[00:13:09] Desiree:Yeah,

[00:13:10] Ciaran: So here's what I do. I have a hit list. a hit list. So I know the things that I want to do. I want to, like San Bernardino has great fall leaves and things to do. So I know there's a place where I want to go take my family to get their mile high apple pie. And I know that I might want to do apple picking. And I know that I want to visit this wildlife sanctuary and zoo. , so I have a list, but I don't have, minute by minute. And I try to stay flexible. If we can hit half the things on the list, I'll be happy.

[00:13:43] Desiree:For me, it depends on who's going with me and where I'm going. If it's a place I know, I want to see a specific thing. Because you really do have to plan that for the most part. But honestly, for me, I'm more of a wing it kind of gal. As long as I know where I'm going to be sleeping, and even that I can plan the night before. I just, I think it's more fun to just sort of land and go, okay, where now? And I will pull up a facebook group for the city and see what the events are. What's going on? Okay. Hey, that sounds kind of fun.

A lot of times, those are the things that end up being just so much fun.

But if I'm going for an event like the New York city concert, I knew I was going to be at a concert most of the time. When the concert fizzled well, that's when we got to wing it and made some of our best memories.

[00:14:31] Ciaran: You know what's really funny, Des, is that as much as I have my hit list, I always drive my husband absolutely crazy because my hit list is my training wheels, how I feel safe. But once I get to a destination, I'm looking at location tags on Instagram and Facebook groups and pinging friends.

And I will totally change the plan and change my mind like 300 times and end up somewhere totally different. Like when we just went to Seattle before our cruise, we needed to get dinner and I was messaging five different friends and I ended up at the number one gluten free restaurant in Seattle, totally unplanned and last minute.

[00:15:09] Nasreen: I don't mess with the eating. I know I need to eat. And I'm fine with snacking, but I need food. My family knows I get grumpy, if I don't eat, it's not good. You got to get me a snack. If I start being a little short, everyone's like, Hey, there's a good snack place over here.

I see. Let's go get a pretzel. And I'm like, That sounds fantastic!

So, but as far as the planned versus unplanned or whatever, I think for me,

I do the training wheels thing too, right? I've got the map. If I know I'm going to a city and I dump a whole bunch of pins on it of things that look cool and are theoretically open, well, we're there.

And part of that is so that I don't Keep losing myself in my phone trying to look things up because I can just glance at the map and see what else is around us and we can get somewhere else pretty quickly. I think for me, if there is something that is a specific time, it is why we are there in the first place.

It's why we're in that city. I saw a restaurant. I absolutely had to try. I saw some super cool museum or experience. And that is why we went on a 3 day trip to that place. , other than that, it really is just kind of going in and out of places that could happen, but doesn't have to.

[00:16:14] Desiree:That makes sense. On my trip. I just took, we were gone eight days, but each day was a different park. We did Zion and then Bryce and then Arches. Each city was a trip in itself, if that makes sense,

where we were traveling between parks in the heat of the day. So we would hike at night, hike in the morning. Travel, hike at night, hike in the morning, travel. That was kind of cool because I remember we went at one point from Paige, Arizona to Kanab, Utah. They are only like an hour and a half apart, very different cities. And Kanab , I checked in the hotel and I'm like, all right, where do we eat?

Where do the locals eat? And that's typically the best thing you can do is once you land, I typically will say to whoever it is when I check in,

Where's your favorite place to hang out tonight? Or where would you go if you had friends come into town and you wanted to show them the real taste of Kanab? That'll get you, that'll get you a whole different trip than what you'll find if you just go to TripAdvisor or Expedia or whatever. The locals are always the key, always.

[00:17:22] Ciaran: This makes me think of a question. What are some things that you guys would do to set yourself up for success for three day trips this fall? Is there anything you would do in advance in order to sow the seeds for a great fall trip.

[00:17:38] Desiree:if I'm driving, then I'm going to be checking the car, making sure the oil is changed, the tires are good. I have a very old car at this point and that makes me a little nervous. But beyond that, No, in all honesty,

[00:17:50] Ciaran: How do you make sure that there's going to be a hotel? Do you use any particular apps or any ways to check into hotels for places that you might want to go, or do you just open hotel tonight and say three hour radius,

[00:18:00] Nasreen: I'm a Hilton girl. I did it for years of travel. I'm always going to check Hilton first and see what I can find. If I can't find something reasonable on Hilton, then I'll go somewhere else. But I've got diamond status. I can usually get on a decent floor.

I know what to expect. That's my first go to. It's just easy. It takes some of the choices out of it. Having too many choices is a curse sometimes, so if you can narrow down a couple things that you're comfortable with, that's one that saves me time.

[00:18:27] Desiree:IHG and I just had my last trip, it was 7 nights gone. Five of the 7 nights were IHG. It was mainly because I needed the trip to be affordable because I'm on a tight budget right now and they were reward nights. I had enough points to cover me. I really should have had IHG sponsor the entire trip. Just because I could tell you about every IHG resort around. I will say if you're traveling out west, Best Western, man, they had great hotels. And on the East Coast, they are not typically great hotels.

[00:18:57] Nasreen: Pacific Northwest as well, Best Western. The first time I stayed there was Necessity, and I was like, oh, this is actually decent,

[00:19:03] Desiree:I was blown away. I was blown away. It's a whole different brand out West, which makes sense since it's best Western, but I never really thought about that. And I hate to go to all brands. Cause I really do want to support the mom and but I will tell you when we were in Zion, I stayed one night, the first night in the lodge in the National Park because I wanted that experience.

It was my one big splurge, that was the experience. The one , I really researched and if you could get one night, I would have probably done two nights there.

But, they didn't have availability for the Saturday night I was there. So I switched to a small mom and pop owned for 80 years. That was a totally different experience. And from what it looked like in the pictures online, it looked really adorable. when I checked in, they literally said, you have the tiny room, you know that, right? And I'm like, didn't know that, but if it's what I bought, I probably just went with the cheapest or least expensive, but it was literally a bed, a bathroom and like this much room between both sides. It was, we were good.

We knew we were only sleeping there. And that was our mentality. It just depends on what your expectations are. I will say the next night we did the upgrade. We went, stayed at the Best Western. It was the most adorable. And it was a room with a hot tub in the room. Now I'm not talking about a big bathtub. It was, after hiking for three days, oh, that was.

[00:20:31] Nasreen: the right decision.

[00:20:32] Desiree:my goodness gracious, that was, that was glorious.

It was the definition of heaven. I will say if you do your little three day weekend trip to anywhere you're going to be hiking or physical, make sure that place has a hot tub because that saved the trip for us over and over.

I like to splurge every now and then and try to go different Just read the reviews.

What about you Ciaran? How do you do it? Well, you already said you call five friends.

[00:20:55] Ciaran: Yeah, you know, honestly, now you have, like, I have, you have me thinking about it, you know, I'm going to get my car checked and ready. I'm going to pick some target areas and make some hit lists. And I'm going to have my bag of snacks ready to go because I think if I have all those training wheels in place, I'll be far more likely to pull the trigger and go. And I totally agree with you about getting out a little bit early, because sometimes that makes all the difference. We always try to leave on a Friday afternoon or a Thursday afternoon, push work back a few hours so that we can just wake up where we want to be.

Just get there.

[00:21:33] Nasreen: Yeah.

And I think for me too, one of the other things that makes it kind of easy to pull the trigger and jump a little bit is I was in business travel for years. You didn't come home and unpack, you just took the laundry out of your suitcase, and then put in your next set the next week, because I had a black week and a brown week, and it was just alternate.

But, I always had stuff packed, which made it easy. Packing isn't a thought process if you have stuff ready to go all the time. I know I go down to my sister's, which is about an hour and a half away. I'll stay over sometimes. So I've got a little go bag of the toiletries and all the things that I would need. I think that does make it better. Someday we'll have to do a beauty routine or what you do kind of thing because having stuff that you know you can use that doesn't have to be packed off of the stuff that's at home definitely makes life easier.

Conditioner!

[00:22:27] Ciaran: minimum essentials. And I do keep , even though I haven't been traveling as much, I still have my toiletries, minimum essentials ready to go.

[00:22:36] Desiree:same.

[00:22:37] Ciaran: And I have a med kit ready to go. So I have all the essentials ready to go at any given point.

The harder thing is if you're bringing kids and you've got to pack all the essentials for them. It's easier to do it just for ourselves.

[00:22:49] Desiree:Yeah, I think because we're travel lovers, I think we'll all always have a go bag ready. Mine it's, you know, the razor, the Q tips, the shampoo, the deodorant, the toothpaste, the toothbrush. The, these are all,

[00:23:03] Nasreen: Hotels never, some don't have it and some have crappy conditioner and I cannot go without conditioner.

[00:23:08] Desiree:I have the little, little tubes from Pantene from years ago, but at any rate, yes, we always have that go bag. Another tip if you do have that limited time is to try and stay in the middle of everything so that you're not wasting your time going back and forth. I've been looking at that as I plan a European Christmas market trip coming up, and I'm looking at all the hotels and making sure they're close to where the Christmas markets are because we're going to have limited time. I don't want to spend an hour getting to the Christmas market each time.

Same thing.

If you're going to be in a place,

Staying close to everything, carry on only if you are flying or even driving, you don't want to lug five suitcases to every separate hotel. We did that with this last trip where we were in a different hotel almost, well, every night. We had one big suitcase that we had to bring because we had trekking poles and hiking boots. So we left that in the car every single night and we just brought in our little carry on. And out. We lived in the car per se, but we slept in the hotel, if that makes sense. But I think those are things that'll make it a lot less stressful, less hassle.

[00:24:13] Nasreen: Definitely. Well, I think we've covered the three day weekend extravaganza. You should do them. You should not overcomplicate them. You probably want to make sure you have somewhere to stay before you get there. That was an important one, I think, but everything else falls into place. It'll all be good.

[00:24:32] Desiree:Exactly.

Exactly.

[00:24:34] Nasreen: Until next week, when we come back to you with another travel topic. Thanks for joining us.

[00:24:39] Desiree:Happy travels.

[00:24:40] Narrator: This has been another episode of Time to Talk Travel, brought to you by HashtagTravels. com. You can keep in touch with us between episodes by checking out our site, joining our newsletter, or connecting with us on social. We've always got the information you need in our episode notes. Until next time, happy travels, and thanks for being a part of our trip.