GTHooD

A Freakonomics post this week introduced me to the concept of the Travel Time Budget,

Perhaps a product of some primeval need to balance exploration and conquest with hanging around the cave and vegging, the universal TTB is said to drive us all to spend about 1.1 hours per day on the go, regardless of nationality, culture, economic system, or era.

I’d also argue that we each have a built in timer for needing to “Get The Hell out of Dodge”  (GTHooD) but that these timers are set at different intervals for each person.

Sometimes, getting away is a simple thing: just drive. For us, that means fairly regular trips “up-island” — usually Nanaimo, but generally somewhere between Duncan and Parksville. Sometimes, we need a bigger break. Last year, we managed to do quite a lot of traveling, hitting Great Wolf Lodge (Spring Break), San Francisco (DrupalCon) and Seattle (my Mother in Law’s birthday). We also ventured  to Vancouver/Port Coquitlam just after Christmas when Mike was very sick. Since Mike didn’t go on the Seattle trip and didn’t get much out of the Christmas trip, his GTHooD timer has been beeping rather insistently for a while.

One of the benefits of getting away is being better able to manage our digital tethers — we can chose to cut off the constant stream of connectivity with less guilt because we can lay blame on things like a lack of wireless or high roaming charges. Really, though, we shouldn’t have to make excuses; like the telephone, online communication should be viewed as an invitation not a command. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, if the phone rang during dinner, we generally ignored it — and that was before answering machines were ubiquitous (for you young folks, answering machines predated voicemail which is the audio equivalent of text messaging).

Thankfully, we are going to GTHooD after work today… assuming mother nature doesn’t fling high winds in the path of the ferries. It’ll be a brief trip but we’ll be leaving the tech behind (Luke! You’ve switched off your targeting computer – what’s wrong?) and I think that’s a good thing.

We’ve been pondering a summer get-away though, something more substantial. I’ve been stock-piling audiobooks for roadtrip entertainment as that seems to be our preferred mode of travel. We haven’t completely ruled out the US, but I think we might wanna keep it in Canada. I have a block of vacation time to use (my “bonus” that I received on working 15 years for my employer); I was “saving” it but my GTHooD timer tells me I need to cash it in.