Five Dogs, Ten Books and Me

With the financial crisis and its aftermath still haunting the people in Europe and the United States, staycations seem to have become very popular again. Enter the term into Google and you will get a dazzling amount of pages offering strategies to improve your holiday at home. Staying at home, however, has been en vogue for lesser reasons in the not-so-distant past. At least in Germany. I’m talking, of course, about the summer of 2003; then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder cancelled his summer vacation after the Italian state secretary for tourism insulted the scores of German tourists that flock to Italy every year. Not only was this incident widely debated in the German media (and not only in the yellow press, even Die Süddeutsche, one of the most respected German broadsheets, featured an article on the issue), it also inspired comedian Elmar Brandt to come up with a song called “Zuhause” that combined German lyrics fitted to the chancellor’s vacation-cancellation with the music for the song “Azzuro” (the song Germans associated with Italy). Soon, the discussion shifted to whether Germans should emulate their Chancellor and stay at home as well.

Back then, my family did go abroad (my parents to France and my brother and me to a summer camp for teenagers in Carinthia – we insisted, France didn’t stand a chance). Nine years on, by the time the 2012 Easter break rolled around, it was clear that I was going to spend my two weeks of free time taking an involuntary staycation at my childhood home because my parents were going to France (creatures of habit, both of them).

My parents’ vacation problem goes something like this: How to go abroad with seven dogs?

Answer: Not at all. That’s the price a breeder pays, I guess.

However, my parents have found a way out of their dog-induced dilemma. Usually they take two or three of the dogs with them and leave the rest in the hands of a competent dog-sitter (me). This year, they took our oldest Wolfhound and one of the two Borzois, while I stayed at home with the rest of the pack.

Now, I really love my parents, and I really love our dogs, but since I moved out two years ago, my limit of tolerance has lowered a bit. So there were times when the dogs were annoying to me. Like when they really didn’t see why I wanted them to go inside at a quarter past midnight. Or when they started barking every five minutes because hikers on their way to the woods were walking past our house. Or when they shamelessly exploited my sleep-deprivation and stole my breakfast from the coffee table. Or when they thought said coffee table was a great place to sit on. (Remember that saying: When the cat’s away the mice play? Well, at my home it’s the dogs that get to do the playing.)

Or when I had to get up at 07:30 a.m. to let them out into the garden and fix their food.

Of course, the dogs are nice company, too, especially if you’re alone in a large old farmhouse on a mountain with only one direct neighbor. Still, after a few days of being cut-off from any human interaction (except for a few phone calls from my parents telling me they were enjoying 22°C and sunshine) I started feeling a little weird. I also started doing weird things like turning on the TV even though I was actually reading a book, just to hear human voices. Or talking to the dogs (OK, I do that anyway, but the amount of time I spent doing that increased the longer I was alone with them).

The nice thing about talking to the dogs is that they don’t talk back. You can get used to not being contradicted, which is why I was slightly annoyed when my brother dropped by and started bossing me around (and leaving dirty dishes on the kitchen counter). Don’t get me wrong, I was really happy to see him, but I had also gotten used to having the house to myself by the time he showed up on Good Friday. And, to be honest, being the master in your parents’ house is still quite nice, even if you’re not a teenager anymore and have moved out a few years ago. I think it has to do with childhood dreams like staying up as long as I want or eating ice cream for breakfast. Which I can of course do in my flat in Salzburg, but somehow doing things like that is particularly nice when I’m staying at my parents’.

Besides talking to them, there is another nice thing about the dogs: I was completely at ease all the time, even in the middle of the night and even though our hose is not surrounded by neighbors. In the company of two Irish Wolfhounds, one Borzoi and two dachshund mixes, who wouldn’t be? Not to mention that no burglar would go astray far enough to end up at my parents’ house (it’s 1100 meters above sea-level and about 12 kilometers away from the center of Berchtesgaden: this is the back of beyond). And the dogs can be really, really cute, too. Just look at those two:

However, besides the pros and cons of dog-sitting, there are other factors that made me enjoy my staycation. One was that I could spend all day reading. And what’s more, I could spend all day reading stuff that I had been meaning to read for a long time. Like The Hunger Games trilogy. Or two anthologies featuring short stories by some of my favorite writers. Or a really good crime novel or two. A Second nice thing about being home alone was the fact that I was able to get some university work done (I know, everyone’s thinking ‘geek’ right now, but I really had lots and lots of time on my hands). The third nice aspect about this staycation is rooted in financial reasoning. My parents had stocked up the freezer and the pantry before they left, so I basically didn’t spend any money for two weeks (at least not on food, books are another matter. I’m on Erasmus von Rotterdam’s side here).

And then there are the upshots about staycations I didn’t really think about at the time, but that I realized only later on. For example, staying at home is more eco-friendly than driving flying to the Seychelles, or Hawaii, or Mallorca. It’s also more eco-friendly than driving to France for that matter. And even if I had had to buy my own food, it would have been much cheaper than a ‘real’ vacation. Let’s be honest, money is the major point for any student who is planning his or her break. In addition to saving money, staying at home also opens the possibility of meeting up with friends that study out of town, like most of my old high school friends. Somehow, this didn’t work out during this year’s Easter break (if you exclude my brother who studies in Vienna). I personally blame everyone else. People knew where I was, and I sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere if I didn’t absolutely have to (the only car I had at my disposal was a really old minivan, and while I like to drive it, I wasn’t going to risk being stranded somewhere).

In the end, I have to say that I really liked my staycation, not only because of the leisure time I spent reading, but also because I don’t really get the concept of flying thousands of miles to lie on a beach, when I can just as well lie in my parents’ garden. What I do get are city trips or driving around a country and stopping at places of interest. When it comes to the value of staying at home, I think Jane Austen took the cake when she wrote: “There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.”