subject: Watching People on Vacation [print this page] Watching People on Vacation Watching People on Vacation
We just returned from vacationing off the Texas coast. We rented a beach house for the week and had a pretty good time. Texas beaches aren't that great as the water is kind of a brown murky color and there's a lot of seaweed all over the place. But it wasn't the metroplex and there wasn't a lot of traffic, so all in all, we enjoyed ourselves.
While there we noticed the usual things that you see on vacation. We saw some wildlife in the water. We saw people on the beach who had no business wearing a bathing suit. Lots of people had coolers full of their favorite adult beverages. But one thing was strangely missing, nobody was smoking any cigarettes. There was the occasional thrown away cigarette butt on the beach, but really that was about it. Now when you went into the surf shops and restaurants, the locals were smoking, but the vacationers weren't.
I find this to be odd. But then I started thinking back to other vacations I've taken. With one exception, that being Las Vegas, pretty much everyone on vacation was going smoke-free. I began to wonder aloud about this and came to the realization that smoking's primary trigger for people is stress. But then I thought, there is a lot of stress that I feel when I travel. Especially, when you're lugging around a cooler, boogie boards, beach towels, beach chairs, and sand castle building equipment from your beach house to the water's edge. So perhaps it isn't stress after all, maybe it's something else.
If there's still stress, then what else is different about being on vacation. This brought me to the breakthrough I was looking for. The primary reason why people don't smoke on vacation (as much anyway) has to be the break from the normal routine. People on vacation have completely different routines than when they are at home. Meal times are usually shuffled around, the time spent in the car is much different, and the people you would normally hang out with aren't there.
So it seems to be more of a break from the normal triggers that allows people to get by on fewer smokes when flying down the ski slopes or tanning on the beaches. This should encourage everyone who has trouble quitting smoking. Just take a well deserved vacation and you'll find yourself being too busy to think about smoking. Then when you get back home, just throw away the cigarettes. Unless of course, you're visiting the in-laws. Then you just might end up smoking more.
