Vacation Homes and Tupperware

My family enjoys vacations and traveling.  When I was a kid, I considered myself fairly cosmopolitan.  And I was, for someone growing up in a Midwest town of 2,000 people in the 1980s.  I flew on a few airplanes when there was still a smoking section, and by the time I had entered Kindergarten, I’d ridden the subway at least a dozen times.  I had a City Mouse Grandpa and a Country Mouse Grandpa that we would visit reasonably often while incorporating interesting stops and adventures along the way.

My parents are generally frugal people so while we did travel from hither and yon, much of it was done via car and overnighting at either a KOA or a motel featuring an even number in the logo.  Do you know how much work it is to set up a tent for a single night?  Though our vacations did include recreational activities and sightseeing, we rarely picked a single destination and stayed there; our trips were always anchored by lodging resulting from the hospitality of family or really close friends.

One summer, I rode in the “way back” of our brown station wagon all the way to Maine to visit my mother’s high school girlfriend.  While driving through New York City on a stopover to stay with Grandpa City Mouse, a teenager standing on a street corner pointed wide-eyed at our license plate and exclaimed, “Kansas!”  He would have been less surprised to have seen aliens.  Highlights of my youthful travels ran the gamut from always packing a swimsuit for annual Christmas treks to South Dakota in the hope that we’d get lucky and find an indoor swimming pool at a Super 8 somewhere in the Nebraska panhandle, to going to see “A Chorus Line” on Broadway with my mother who told me that the word in the lyrics of “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love” was ‘diarrhea’ instead of ‘gonorrhea.’  To say that I am grateful for a perspective on life framed in part by the idea that an indoor pool at a discount motel is something worth looking forward to along with being allowed to experience fine arts which included matter-of-fact references to venereal disease would be an understatement.

We drove to San Diego once to stay with my Aunt and celebrate a cousin’s bat mitzvah.  (Same brown station wagon, actually.  Shout out to Lee Iacocca; despite bad press, our Dodge Aspen ran great!)  On the way, we checked into a motor lodge outside Tucumcari, New Mexico.  In the corner of the motel room, there was a mysterious coin operated machine attached to the bed.  My dad, always one to avoid topics that could be considered risqué (unlike my mother), called it a “ride for kids” and gave us all the quarters from his jangle-y right pocket.  I think we saw the Grand Canyon on that same trip, but to this day we talk more about “the time we stayed at the motel with the Magic Fingers” than one of the seven wonders of the natural world.  On the way home, we drove through Nevada and stayed at the Circus Circus in Las Vegas  I remember ordering Thousand Island Dressing on my salad and seeing a waitress blow the head off a mug of beer.  Fancy stuff.

As a parent, I enjoy planning vacations for my own little family of four.  Instead of routing travel based on widely dispersed family and friends, we generally pick a destination we are interested in exploring or a place with attractions that will supplement what our kids are learning about in school.  Thanks to a professionally dictated travel schedule, I’ve amassed quite a few hotel points and miles.  This alleviates the need for days-long road trips and avoids arguing about who has to sleep on Grandma Country Mouse’s pull-out sofa with the pokey spring.  While we do enjoy camping, we don’t do it en route to other places; we just pitch the tent, hang a hammock, and stay awhile.  On occasion, we’ll also rent vacation homes or condos if we’re anywhere more than a night or two.  It’s nice to have a little more space and be able to avoid the crowds and costs of restaurants.  Although I’m now the adult, I enjoy traveling with my kids.  I’d like to think that they are as relatively well traveled as I was at their age, although I now understand why my mom insisted the word was diarrhea.

Over the past year, we’ve received more than a handful of invitations reading something like this:

“Stan and I have been so blessed.  God has graced us with the ability to purchase our own little slice of heaven, and we want to share it with you!  Please consider our second home your vacation destination, but make sure to call me first, so our property management company can get you the friends and family discount!”

Hold it right there, Mrs. Stans of the World.  This is not an invitation; it is a solicitation.  And some of ya’ll are not my friends, let alone relation!  Acquaintances with an email address or a social media connection are not in the inner circle.  I’ve had the friends and family vacation experience.  It involves cat hair, bunk beds, and uncles who tease you relentlessly with nicknames like Helga Armbruster.  “Friends” is burying time capsules under a porch with your mom’s-best-friend’s-son while your dads fish together.  Family is puking on your cousin—in the back of a Dodge Aspen station wagon–who was ignorant enough to wear his new leather bomber jacket on a ski trip.  Its five kids chugging red Gatorade in a hot tub while their mom and I ignore them, drink wine, and dance to 90’s hair metal.

While I understand the enthusiasm and pride over purchasing property:  “Rental fees are the only way we can afford this place” is not the flex that the new homeowners may think it is.  As a businessperson, my mind immediately goes to the downside risk of cash flow.  If God has indeed facilitated this purchase, I hope His blessings also include deep reserves, an economy where potential renters have discretionary income, and local ordinances allowing short term rentals into perpetuity.  I hate to break it to Mrs. Stan, but really successful people don’t charge others to use their properties, if they lend them out at all.

Finally, and most importantly, families who spend thousands of dollars on vacation lodging to visit places of interest are not going to be motivated in picking a destination by the allure of saving a couple hundred bucks.  No one is going to Pigeon Forge instead of the Grand Tetons if they really want to go to the Grand Tetons.  Likewise, no one is flying to the Grand Tetons when they really just want to drive to Pigeon Force.  Myrtle Beach is not Sanibel Island, and Eureka Springs is not Palm Springs.  I’m sure the desire to share the little slice of heaven is well-intentioned, but sharing is not a discount, and a sale is not hospitality.  Buy a rental; great!  Just don’t offer shirt-tail acquaintances discounts and consider it anything other than a sales pitch.

Growing up, I remember my mother griping about her girlfriends “inviting” her to cheese-and-cracker open houses where there would be “no pressure to buy” but Tupperware or Amway would be available for purchase.   I’ll never forget her reply when I asked why she didn’t like attending Mary Kay parties:  “Because I’d eat cheese and crackers with a friend at any time.  I don’t want to be invited anywhere simply because someone wants my money.”  I thought I’d hit that rite of passage when the PTA preschool moms started inviting me to their LuLaRoe trunk shows, but I can now see-and-raise that unfortunate experience with an invitation to subsidize a “friend’s” second home.

Folks, if you wouldn’t invite someone over for cheese and crackers for no reason, please don’t offer them the use of a vacation property, charge for the honor, and call it being a friend.  I don’t believe anyone’s real estate manifests from glorifying God, so if we could all resist the urge to serve up the good news alongside a heaping helping of prosperity gospel that would be great, too.  God wants people to have vacation homes just as much as He wanted a twelve-year-old to experience the thrill of Tucumcari’s Magic Fingers.  The real estate market is hot, and borrowing has been cheap, period.  I’m not sure how much God had to do with all that, but I know that when He shares Grace, it doesn’t come with hors d’oeuvres  and a ‘no pressure’ pitch for Tupperware.