I have to laugh when it comes to my inability to actually book vacation time. As a self-employed individual, I'm guilty of working long hours, working over the weekends, and often missing "fun social events" in order to keep my business moving forward. In the early years, you'd be hard pressed to see me taking anything more than a Sunday off every other month, plus I normally ignored statutory holidays all together. I actually blame my iCalendar for my lack of regulated holiday awareness. If you have an iCalendar you will notice that holidays aren't in there at all, so whenever I looked at my calendar all I saw were potential days for potential clients. It is a regular joke in my house whenever a stat holiday is approaching - I normally receive a daily countdown until the actual holiday so that I remember to take the day off.

In the last few years I've come to the realization that vacation time is a necessary and important part of my ability to not only become a more balanced person, but it actually assists me in being a conductor of innovation within my business. Once I was able to grab onto this revelation, I felt a great sense of freedom. However, my next unknown hurdle to tackle surrounded my financial ability to jet-set away from my working world.

My husband and I would be considered your regular kind of folk. We live in a modest home, we enjoy the simplicities of life and the company of our friends, and like most people, love a good deal when we see one. So, naturally we flocked to the popular online red ticket travel websites to see what our vacation options were like. After spending hours on the sites, we soon realized that if we wanted to plan for more than one or two vacations throughout the year, we would need a lot more money then what we currently had available. With this news in mind, we started to look at different types of vacation options, options where we would still feel like we could effectively remove ourselves from our working world without having to spend extravagant amounts of money. It was at this point that we began to consider the possibility of planning a 'staycation' right here in Saskatoon.

Wikipedia describes a staycation as 'a period in which an individual or family stays home and participates in leisure activities within driving distance, sleeping in their own beds at night.' Personally, that sounds like a regular weekend to me. Nothing too special or relaxing about that kind of vacation. I might as well pick up a few groceries while I'm trekking around the city! My idea of a staycation involves more relaxation, more pampering, and small bits of planned excitement, whether that be in the comfort of my own home or somewhere else.

After doing a bit of research, I discovered that planning a staycation was really similar to planning a 'jet-setting' kind of vacation. So to assist us in making our staycations as rewarding as possible, I decided to devise a short 7 step process that I believe makes a staycation something to look forward to. Use these steps the next time you consider a staycation in Saskatoon. 

Step 1 - Identify the Objective of the Staycation

• Are you in need of some quite time and relaxation?
• Are you feeling cooped up and in need of some excitement or adventure?

Step 2 - Agree on a Budget

• Nothing is worse than finding something you love and realizing you can't have it.

Step 3 - Pick Your Timeframe

• A regular weekend
• Make a regular weekend a long weekend by taking a Friday or Monday off
• Take a week and really detach

Step 4 - Schedule Your Activities

• The best thing you can do for yourself is schedule your activities before hand. Maybe it looks as simple as reading a book, or as extravagant as skydiving. Whatever it may be, make sure you schedule it, otherwise you might easily miss out on achieving the objective you set in Step 1.

Step 5 - Determine Your Accommodations

• Consider booking a hotel room or weekend at a local bed and breakfast. Removing yourself from your home might be exactly what you need to shake off the day to day routine. Visit websites like Trip Advisor to read reviews about local accommodations. Some highly recommended spots we know of are Ninth Street Bed & Breakfast and The James Hotel.
• Your home might be the perfect place to rest your head during your staycation. If you like the comforts of home, consider hiring a local cleaning service like Glass Slipper Cleaners to come and clean your home prior to your staycation, so that chores you typically do on the weekend are taken care of.

Step 6 - Agree On Your Transportation

• Hire a driver for the weekend through Provincial Car Service
• Use your own vehicle
• Opt for being adventurous and take the local public transit
• If you are staycationing in the warmer months, consider using a pedal bike or walking to your destinations

Step 7 - Plan Your Meals

• Eating at local restaurants and cafe's comes at a cost, but if you're looking to have the weight of preparing meals off of your shoulders, visit websites like urbanspoon.ca or tastesaskatoon.com for local restaurant reviews
• Pre-made meals are also an option, whether that be your own pre-made cooking or from local meal assembly centre, Dinner Rush.
• I think the mistake that some of us make when planning a staycation is not planning. We automatically, without realizing it, equate a staycation as a 'less than' vacation, and as a result put little effort into planning it. Like with anything in life, little effort equals little reward.

Since discovering that staycations can in fact be just as effective as a 'jet-setting' vacation, my husband and I have enjoyed the process of planning more than one well deserved vacation in a calendar year.