Vacation

The NY Times reports on the the pressures hitting our vacations.

Skimping on vacations comes with physical and mental costs, psychologists say. In a nation where 35 percent of employed workers already leave some vacation days on the table, according to one study, this can lead to what the author and work-life coach Joe Robinson calls “vacation deficit disorder.”

Men who shrugged off vacations for five straight years were 30 percent more likely to suffer a heart attack than those who took an extended break from work every year, according to a multiyear study by Brooks B. Gump, an associate professor of psychology at State University of New York, Oswego, and a colleague, Karen A. Matthews. Vacations may boost what psychologists call the brain’s “reserve capacity,” which helps it “cope with stressors that come up,” Dr. Gump said. Vacation, he added, “is a buffer.”

Get out there and relax.

Out There in the Great Plains

Connecting with nature on the Great Plains? Yup, and worth doing.

The idea of rewilding the West takes its inspiration from two professors, Frank and Deborah Popper. In an essay written two decades ago in the journal Planning, they suggested restoring the Upper Midwest to its native state, which they called the Buffalo Commons, and largely replacing agriculture in the region with eco-tourism.

While many Western conservationists do not agree with elements of the Buffalo Commons, preservation efforts have taken off. The American Prairie Foundation, a group dedicated to creating prairie wildlife reserves, has been buying up land in Montana and reintroducing wild American bison, which had largely vanished in the region. Another nonprofit group, the Great Plains Restoration Council is helping to preserve open land in South Dakota. Private landowners, too, have been buying land to return it to open space — Ted Turner, who owns some two million acres of Western land concentrated in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota and Oklahoma, has helped restore bison herds on his property.

Summer Places

OK, so not all of the NY Times 31 Places to Go This summer will get you hooked into to nature, but a number of them will. There are also some great places to take kids so they connect.


I choose numbers 2, 5, 15, and 20 to start with.

But plan any trip carefully--the hiking around Cherry Mountain can be pretty tough--some of the steepest in the Whites, and its twin summits are actually called Owlshead and Mt. Martha.

Postscript: Speaking of NH, checkout this trip journal of a hiker traveling the Cohos Trail, which traverses across the least visited and wildest parts of the White Mountains