Above: Summer Picnic by Edward Fielding
I have a friend who rents out a cottage on Cape Cod via Airbnb and I said to her once, “How has your repeat business been?”
She replied, “Why would anyone come back to the same place?”
You see she likes to travel and her friends like to travel so they are always going to new places around the world. If one friend goes someplace, the rest of their friend group goes to the same place the next year.
I like to explore new places but even more, I like to spend extended time in a place to really get to know it. If I like a place, I want to return. Take Prince Edward Island for example.
I’ve probably spent four-week long summer vacations on island over the years and would love to go back. It’s not that big of a place, maybe a two-hour drive from tip to tip but there are so many back roads and secluded beaches to explore.
Perhaps it’s the photographer’s eye that makes one want to spend more time in a place instead of just checking off another tourist attraction on one’s bucket list.
Growing up with a large family with four kids, most of our summers were spent in a little cottage at Chalker Beach in Old Saybrook, CT. Our days were spent on the little community beach, hanging out at the seasonal general store, fishing among the rocky breakwater, practicing our balance on the jetties, catching crabs and building sandcastles on the mudflats at low tide. We never went more than a quarter-mile all summer.
I’m not sure if today’s generation has a chance to experience this sense of place anymore, replaced by trips to Disney World. And those little cottages middle-class families or even groups of blue-collar folks chipping into buying a family place on the shore or lake are even affordable to regular folk anymore. Now if we are lucky we can afford a few nights in someone else’s house.
When you return to a place year after year you develope memories around the landscape as well as the local seasonal businesses, the arcade, the ice cream shop and even the little grocery store where you beg your parents for candy.