Why are Rest Days essential in travel? Find Out

Its been a long time again since I posted something, but when life is so dynamic and happening, one cannot help 😉

Anyway, so recently I had many discussions about this topic with some of my friends, and I thought why not put my thoughts up here to see what everyone else thinks about it!

So for us, especially countries where the population is enormous, things are not as easy as first-world countries when it comes to Travelling. Travel is a luxury for most of us, and we want to optimize it as much as we can. However, most of us, many times, do not or cannot estimate the impact it has on our overall experience.

When we travel, we travel to cover more base and do things that everyone wants to cover, and due to this mentality, we always tend to fill our days with more and more activities.
But while doing all this, we tend to forget the real beauty or feeling of living/absorbing something different, which instead should be the only focus.

I was recently a part of a trip where my friends arranged an eight-day multi-city tour in which we covered vast ground, but did we enjoy? Yes. Were we tired as well? Yes. Now you must be thinking if people take trips, they include as much as they can and enjoy it, what’s the point of this topic or what’s more to discuss? Right!

But I want you to know that there is much much more than to just covering places and running around to include most activities. Being said that, I am not against traveling and doing more touristic things, but my point is that our focus should not only be to include spots/things instead of enjoying every day of stay with a local and different environment.

For this, I think the best approach I follow is to keep enough relax days on your trips, even when the tours are just a week long. Rest days are beneficial to enhance your travel experience if you know how important they are and how they should be used. For me, I always take a couple of rest days even if its ten days trip, because travel is or should not be about just ticking off places but rather feeling its culture or enjoying its unique feelings/vibes.

Now Rest days could mean many different things to different people coming from different places, but in this context, it is related to taking some days off within your vacation, because for most of us, even holidays are considered like tasks and we want to be most productive even in our vacations, and that creates fatigue within the travel period or post-travel.

However, many of you won’t agree as you would feel your X or Y trip was excellent and it didn’t have any relax days, which I agree because the point is that most probably you have never tried vacation with taking days-off in between or you never made a long enough trip to experience this.

Below are two scenarios which will probably make more sense for the whole of the above context:
Two Different Groups of Friends Travel to Paris or any other city, and they do things slightly differently and how their experience would most probably turn out:

Group 1 [With No Rest Days]
– Day 1
– Land to Paris
– Check-In and Rest for Couple of Hours
– Take Evening Tour/Night Bus
– Day 2
– Visit Disneyland
– Day3
– Visit Famous Attractions
– Day 4
– Visit Extra Attractions trying to cover up all missed things.

Group 2 [With Enough Rest time Included]
– Day 1
– Land to Paris
– Check-In and Rest for Couple of Hours
– Take a walk around your hotel and have a very lazy dinner to enjoy the actual vibe
– Day 2
– Visit Disneyland and Explore Clubbing at night
– Day 3
– Visit Famous Attractions
– Day 4
– Take rest half day and enjoy the evening in local bars/cafes to know more about locals or take a long walk and go around the city just for a few hours.

Now, there is not a massive difference in the operations of both groups, but there is a huge difference in how they will remember this experience.

So to compare, Group 1 did a lot more than group 2 in terms of covering the base, doing more activities, visiting many places, but Group 2 did more of local explorations without missing out main things, and also got more than enough rest to enjoy the vibe/local markets/strolling on streets/just having coffee in a local cafe and thinking about how amazing this trip has been still being on the trip.

So when they both go back home, both would have amazing experiences, but Group 2 would have lived a little more in the present moment without actually just running around, and that would create a soothing feeling when you think of it. We have a way of feeling the same feeling when we think about our special experiences, and if your experience was exhausting, you are gonna feel a pinch of sigh whenever you think of it, but if your experience was more of leisure sipping coffee in a local cafe for half-day, you are gonna get a smile 😉 Try this!

I think the idea of a vacation is not to get tired doing it, and this idea is successful only when you see your tour/vacation as pure leisure and not some investment/task which you want to get most out of it. If you try to get most out of your holiday with cramping up every hour of it, you will end up exhausted wanting it to end early so you can go back home and rest. And if you wish that at any point, do you see any valid point to take the vacation in the first place?

So to conclude this, I would just say that, we as humans want to get out most of anything we do, but vacation is something which should be totally reversed, meaning, you should not think vacation or your tour as something to get most out of it, instead think as a time you want to waste totally, and if you do, you are likely to feel exhausted which might give you lot of pictures, but you would be missing a lot of satisfaction you would instead get in actually enjoying the vibe and different culture of any place.

Let me know your thoughts and experiences where you have felt something like this would apply!