Is It Wasting Time to Take a Break on Vacation?

Is taking a day to relax a poor use of time when you’re traveling somewhere new?

Should you pack your international vacation with as much activity as possible since you might have spent the better part of a day getting to your destination? If you’re not otherwise visiting a place that’s meant for relaxation (like a beach resort), should you try to remain as active as possible for the duration of your trip?

If you spent all year – or even multiple years – saving up for an international trip that took you hours and hours of plane travel and taxi rides to accomplish, is all that effort for naught if you sit back one day to admire the view? There are probably a few schools of thought here, but I’m going to break down a few scenarios for you.

In one scenario, you’re in pursuit of an exciting vacation where you’re going on all sorts of adventures. You might have bicycle rides through Paris planned or some sort of high-flying adventure like skydiving or paragliding in Medellin booked. You might have just a week to get all the fun out of your vacation you can.

In another scenario, you might be traveling to the entire other side of the world with a few weeks worth of traveling time in front of you. There are multiple days ahead where you’ll get to see all sorts of amazing things you’ve always dreamed of seeing in person. Maybe it’s the Eiffel Tower or the Great Wall of China, or Machu Picchu.

How do you spend your time wisely when traveling internationally? Should you take a break when traveling to the far reaches of the planet?

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Getting Rundown On an International Vacation

The menace for almost every international traveler is exhaustion, whether that’s getting jetlagged, not getting enough sleep each night, or finding yourself in a truly uncomfortable bed. Sometimes, these things can’t be helped because of the timing of your flights or the scheduling of your activities when you arrive.

If you really want to see a certain tourist attraction and you can only see it on a very specific day, your options might be limited for time. You might simply need to go with the flow and take your tour or visit the attraction when it’s available. In other circumstances, you might have the freedom to recover a bit from your flights and give yourself some time before your adventure begins.

You can definitely get rundown on a vacation if you hit the ground running at the very start and keep your activities at high speed the entire time. Inserting a day or a half day of rest into the mix can mean the difference between truly enjoying your tours or waking up feeling like you were just hit by the train you need to take to your next destination.

I’ve definitely come to the conclusion of a vacation and felt a little tired after several days of traveling all over the place. It isn’t such a big deal when you’re planting your feet in a specific town for four or five days, but you can definitely start to feel tired every day when you’re sleeping in a new bed every night and taking off for some new place every day.

How Do You Rest But Not Feel Like You Have FOMO?

As a traveler who wants to see as much as I can of every place I visit, I have to work seriously hard on my fear of missing out (FOMO). Whenever I’m planning my excursions, I think I actually let my FOMO get the best of me when I visited Morocco in March of 2024 because I had us booked for tours every day and sometimes twice a day.

Morocco is a fascinating country with amazing people and history, and I couldn’t stand to miss any of it. This need to see as much as possible was compounded by the fact that I had to cut the trip short by a day and a half because we ended up flying to Sicily to meet up with friends. I had no choice but to modify the trip to take advantage of the visit to Italy.

Unfortunately, we both caught a cold midway through the trip when we reached Casablanca and our second day there was really tough. I actually tried to cancel the tour, but the guide was very persuasive in getting us to go. I was fully prepared to just eat the cost of it since I would have been canceling so close to the start of the journey.

Now, I realize that our level of exhaustion was partly due to the fact that we both caught a cold (it was a 24-hour bug, so it didn’t really wreck the trip), but I did really pack that trip with a lot of activities, and we spent a busy three days in Marrakech before going to Casablanca for another set of busy tours. It just got too overwhelming.

How Much Time Is Too Much Time?

Now, I do think you can get to the point where you’re wasting too much time doing nothing on a vacation, where the whole point is to experience the sights, sounds, and culture of the country. There is something interesting and new to experience in every country, even if you’re an American who’s just hopping across the border into Canada to visit Banff for a few days.

Having traveled for more than two weeks internationally at a time, my own tolerance for doing nothing is about a half a day. I can’t seem to take an entire day off to do absolutely nothing unless I’m legitimately sick or have caught a cold. Even if I’m out and about every day for the better part of a week, I really don’t need more than a half day to relax and get myself together for the next adventure.

To accomplish this, I might take a look at a city tour for the evening that only takes like two hours. Or, I might arrange a tour for the morning, where we stroll around for a few hours, get some lunch, and then laze around for the rest of the day. I did this in Cartagena for our first day there on our Colombia trip, and it worked amazingly well.

On the second day of our visit to the city, we went on an all-day tour that took us along the Caribbean coastline of Colombia (that’s the picture you see above!) where we snorkeled, went to the beach, and went on a boat ride. The full-day activity was much easier to enjoy after having had a relaxing day the day before. No wasted time, really. Just a bit of relaxation thrown in there. Perfect.

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