Escaping the Radiology Reading Room and Juggling Vacation Priorities with Your Significant Other

Last week, I wrote about some of my early-career discoveries in regard to vacationing. Medical education and training being what they are, it is easy for youngish docs to suddenly have time and means to enjoy themselves away from work and no concrete ideas for how to do it.

Of course, this is a happy challenge to have. It certainly beats not having the free time or spare bucks to spend.

On the other hand, a challenge is a challenge because it has potential for undesirable outcomes. I didn’t experience any of note, but it is very possible to emerge from a vacay thinking things like, “Gosh, that wasn’t much fun,” or “That cost way more than it was worth.” Those truly unfortunate can wind up with injury, illness, or worse from a particularly bad outing.

When I got started, there was much less popular wisdom to be found online than there is now. There were still reviews to help you choose between destinations, hotels, etc., but they didn’t quite cover everything you might want, especially if you were curious about something a little off the beaten path.

On the other hand, it was possible to get a sense that you had seen most worthwhile intel that was out there, whereas today you can read stuff until your eyes glaze over and still lack a sense of decision, in part because of so many fake reviews from bots and folks with vested interests.

Such reviews, both professional and amateur, remain a component of my vacay research. However, for these reasons and more, I prioritize “word of mouth” testimony from friends and family. Even second- and thirdhand accounts outweigh just about anything I would find online.

Amongst the endless other benefits of finding someone else to share your vacations with (I acquired a world traveling buddy before I found the lady in my life), you wind up with another person’s worth of intel on top of your own. If you are lucky, it is someone who knows more than you. My travel mate had been to six continents before I had touched my second.

You can also make your own such luck during solo outings like the ones I mentioned last week. If you’re having dinner at a bar in New Orleans or attending a rad conference in Vegas, there are plenty of other folks around who might be in precisely the same boat. You might not hit it off so spectacularly as to become lifelong friends and travel together, but they could very well clue you in to other destinations/conferences that you can target for your next easy fun destination.

That might be all you need. Maybe you just want to party it up with your time off, after you have used what you are going to on “obligations” like visiting friends/fam. You may have an endless appetite for all-inclusive resorts and cruises. I nicknamed such vacations as “easy” ones. Once I had zeroed in on where I would be staying and how I would get there and back, I didn’t need to do any more planning. The venues were essentially prepackaged fun.

If you are like me (or my other half), however, you crave variety. It can be useful to develop a system for mixing things up so that variety sort of happens on autopilot. Some of that happens organically if you and whoever you are traveling with have differing interests. Yes, that can make it difficult to agree on things that all parties will like but with a little creativity and flexibility, it can also multiply your options.

For example, as previously stated, I like beachy, warm weather destinations. I used to do all of my traveling to escape the cold winters where I live. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, I had “built the life I didn’t need to vacation from” in the warmer half of the year, when all I had to do for an enjoyable day was stroll out of my house and choose from dozens of local destinations, including my own backyard.

This isn’t the case for my lady. Idly lounging poolside or on a beach makes her stir-crazy. She wants to go exploring and do things, and prolonged sun exposure is not her friend. As a result, I finally had a reason/excuse to do some vacationing in the summer, targeting places I never would have on my own. Northern Europe, for instance, wasn’t a place I would choose for a February getaway, but at the same time I would be loath to sacrifice a week of my summertime at home.

Things evolved into a standard pattern for our annual trips. We would do one summer trip of primary interest to her, a winter outing for me, and then a couple of random spring/fall flings. Destinations were, of course, always chosen to have some mutual interest. Next summer, for instance, we are headed to Iceland for the solar eclipse (and a week’s worth of touring around while we are there).

Folks have differing notions regarding a good pace for their trips. One couple I know provides a great example of this. The wife prefers a waste no time approach, hitting the ground running and seeing as much as possible, even if it means she is exhausted by the time she gets home. In the process, there is plenty of opportunity for anxiety and missed appointments. She is a bit of an adrenaline junkie so it suits her.

The husband nicknamed his pace the “old man itinerary” (semi-ironically, since he was in his 40s at the time). He still very much wants to get out and see/do things, but in a more relaxed way. He wants there to be ample time in case they are delayed getting to points of interest, or they like being somewhere and want to linger a bit before rushing on to the next port of call.

My lady and I are closer to one another in the rush-rush/relax spectrum, but I still lean towards the “old man” itinerary myself. Even when we are doing one of my warm winter getaways and I make sure it’s somewhere with plenty of attractions/activity, we tend to schedule our “adventure” outings to occupy around half of any given day. That leaves us plenty of slack to relax, randomly explore, or cram in an extra adventure if we should happen to discover one.

If one were to poll the radiological population at large, I suspect there would be a preference for the more relaxed pace. When you spend the non-vacation majority of your year pounding away at worklists that constantly threaten to grow faster than you can consume them, you probably don’t seek that same sense of “hurry up” in your downtime.