Getaway Collective has no ownership or commercial interest in what is discussed here.

Somebody who lives to eighty gets a little over four thousand Saturdays. It is a small enough number to hold in your head, which is the only reason it is worth stating — nobody has ever changed a decision because of a figure they could not picture.

The arithmetic that follows is less comfortable. Assume the first twenty years belong to childhood and the last ten to a slower kind of time. That leaves roughly two and a half thousand in the middle, and the middle is where the work is. Take out the ones already committed — to obligation, to travel, to recovering from the week — and what remains is a few hundred that are genuinely yours to place.

Distance is what actually spends them

The usual assumption is that people go away less often because they are busy. The more reliable predictor is how far away the somewhere is.

A place ninety minutes from home is a Friday evening decision. A place four hours away is a plan, and a plan needs a reason, and a reason needs a long weekend. The first gets used thirty times a year without anybody deciding to use it. The second gets used four times, and two of those are because somebody else was coming.

This is why proximity behaves like a luxury rather than a convenience. It does not make an hour better. It converts hours that would not otherwise have existed.

The summers version

There is a harder form of the same arithmetic, and parents recognise it immediately. A child is eight for one year. If somewhere takes a full day to reach, you will be there together perhaps three times while they are eight. If it takes two hours, perhaps twelve.

The place did not change. The number of times a family assembled in it did, and that is the only variable a family actually remembers.

What this does not argue

It does not argue for buying anything. A rented house ninety minutes away beats an owned one four hours away on this measure, and it is worth saying plainly because the opposite conclusion would be the convenient one for us to reach.

What it argues is narrower: when people evaluate somewhere to go regularly, they weigh the qualities of the place and almost never weigh the distance, and the distance is the term that decides how much of it they actually get.