Dealing with sadness over disappointing vacation?

[Anonymous]

I get it. I think anyone is would be disappointed that their vacation was spent on the bathroom floor. But nothing can be done about it so I never see the use in wallowing. Can you start to plan another one? Even if it's months away?

[Anonymous]

I think it is funny how people make a big deal about going on vacation and do a ton of unnecessary planning. We go, we do, we have fun. None of it, is a big production or a big deal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it is funny how people make a big deal about going on vacation and do a ton of unnecessary planning. We go, we do, we have fun. None of it, is a big production or a big deal.

+1. It also comes from spending “too much” money on the vacation. It requires you to put more pressure on extracting “value” (fun? Memories?) from the vacation.

[Anonymous]

You had fun planning and looking forward to it, so factor that into the experience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Expectations are always greater than reality. Lower your expectations; also sounds like you need to do some work with a therapist. I predict you are a firstborn high-functioning perfectionist with latent ADHD.

RUDE! What did I do to you?!

OP, I have this experience sometimes and I think it's a function of not having enough to look forward to in my daily life, plus anxiety. I used to be in academia so I was used to a lot more work travel plus flexible time off; now that I have more typical PTO, vacation time and travel feel so scarce and precious, there's almost too much anticipation.

NP and to the 2 PPs above...ok I feel seen

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We’ve cut way back on travel for this reason.

DH and I both work and when we take time off work, it just means working harder in the week leading up to the trip and then the week after.

Then it costs all this money that we don’t really have.

It just makes the stakes too high. I find it easier to just take days off and chill at home or see friends rather than traveling.

If we had more money or less stressful jobs maybe it would be different

I’m not quite here and the money isn’t that tight for us but I’m a little leery of super expensive trips that feel like they come with huge build up. Especially since Covid, I feel like the chance of some or all of us getting sick is pretty decent and that causes me a lot of stress in advance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I got food poisoning once on day 1 and spent the entire expensive vacation in an expensive hotel room bathroom floor while my DH did a few of the expensive excursions by himself and we let the other ones go to waste. It was awful, and frankly 8 years later it still is to remember. I always plan for bad weather wherever we go and my expectations there are always low, but you can’t plan for debilitating illness.

Food poisoning is not a debilitating illness. Try an auto-immune disease on for size. Or maybe threw in a few brain tumors.

What? Food poisoning is absolutely a debilitating illness. Do you think debilitating means a permanent impairment? Doofus.

[Anonymous]

I go into every trip knowing it won’t be exactly what I want. It just can’t be. Kids limit what we can do, so does money, so do work responsibilities and of course weather. And of course travel issues.

There is always a perfect way to do every destination- a perfect season, BnB versus resort or home rental, cruise and tour of self tour. People always say you need X days to do whatever.

It will never be perfectly planned for us. So I figure something is better than nothing!

Like everyone says if you go to Ireland you have to travel around and stay in different places. My kids would hate that. So we will stay in one place - not my ideal - but better than nothing.

We just came from what was supposed to be a beach trip and it rained 4 of the 6 days. Sucked. But we went to a lot of museums, went on some longer rides to see stuff we normally would not have done and we did the best we could. Not what I expected but it was still fun.

[Anonymous]

We are on vacation now in a place where it’s supposed to be sunny and beautiful most of the time in August, and of course it’s rained a ton. I fully admit to being type A and had a schedule of activities planned, many of which were cancelled. So it’s not the vacation I expected and I’m allowing myself to be sad that we missed things I really looked forward to doing. But we also did a few spontaneous activities that ended up being fun and I’m sure pretty soon I’ll have forgotten the things I missed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We didn't get to go on our honeymoon because the island got hit by a hurricane two days before the wedding. We went on a smaller US vacation.

We had never been on trip together and just graduated from dental school. Dirt poor.

You make the best of it. You can find the joy in just being together.

Clearly you weren’t “dirt poor” if you were planning to fly to an island resort for your honeymoon right after paying for a wedding. C’mon.

Or did you use a honeyfund? LOL

[Anonymous]

I love planning vacations - but due to significant mobility issues and family health - I rarely get to travel anymore and I miss it. But I still enjoy the planning - so I have become our family's - go-to - travel researcher and strategist. While I miss going places and seeing things - it's oddly relaxing to plan the trip - not have to spend the money, pack my bags or deal with the disappointments that can come when things don't live up to expectations. With that said - had I known that I wouldn't have been able to travel anymore - I wouldn't have complained about the trips I did take. My message is to enjoy what you have when you have it because you don't know when it will be gone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Expectations are always greater than reality. Lower your expectations; also sounds like you need to do some work with a therapist. I predict you are a firstborn high-functioning perfectionist with latent ADHD.

Wow not OP but I am laughing at how true this is.

I was reading this post and feeling empathy because I often end up disappointed after highly anticipated trips or events (something I am working on). And I am a high functioning perfectionist (only child not firstborn) diagnosed with ADHD late in life after one of my kids was found to have ADHD/Autism. I also realized I had a mild learning disorder, but am gifted enough that I was able to overcompensate.

Your post made me laugh at how easily you were able to make this connection!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I got food poisoning once on day 1 and spent the entire expensive vacation in an expensive hotel room bathroom floor while my DH did a few of the expensive excursions by himself and we let the other ones go to waste. It was awful, and frankly 8 years later it still is to remember. I always plan for bad weather wherever we go and my expectations there are always low, but you can’t plan for debilitating illness.

Food poisoning is not a debilitating illness. Try an auto-immune disease on for size. Or maybe threw in a few brain tumors.

DP but in the scope of a short period (vacation) food poisoning that keeps you holed up for days is debilitating. It makes you unable to participate in anything planned during travel which is the purpose of this thread.

I once took a trip with extended family, our toddler threw up on the plane ride down and in the coming days every single other person went down like dominoes (kids, parents, grandparents). The people not sick yet were busy taking care of those who were (I’ve never cleaned so much vomit out of car seats and such in my life) and then the people who recovered helped bring water and crackers to the ones who got it last. I was the very last hold out and spent the last 48 hours of “vacation” vomiting. We finally all felt better on the day of our flight home. Pretty sure it was norovirus and it was absolutely debilitating for us.

[Anonymous]

This is why people repeat vacations to destinations that went well. Expectations are much more realistic and therefore there is less anxiety. We still do some new destinations, but I often have a better time on the repeat trips. As the family travel planner, it’s also way less work and decision making for me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it is funny how people make a big deal about going on vacation and do a ton of unnecessary planning. We go, we do, we have fun. None of it, is a big production or a big deal.

+1. It also comes from spending “too much” money on the vacation. It requires you to put more pressure on extracting “value” (fun? Memories?) from the vacation.

I think this symptomatic of life in America right now though (at least for parents). Most people get 2-3 weeks PTO the entire year which has to cover all sort of things like daycare closures, school breaks, etc. Add in inflation and people are stretching themselves to take time off and travel. It makes it feel high stakes.

It’s probably easier to just dust it off if you’re in a position to be able to take a lot of time off during the year and have plenty of money to plan fun things. But travel is an absolute luxury for many people so I can get why a splurge that ends up disappointing would feel like a hit because you know it may be a very long time until you get to do something like that again.

And it’s easy to say don’t put too much effort into planning or spend too much when you’re not in the position of having to carefully budget each hour of PTO or travel dollar. Many people have to carefully plan to even get to take trips a lot of posters on here would consider minor travel.