Coaxing Parents to Unplug on Vacation
Parents need a vacation just as much, if not more, than their kids do.
July 15, 2010, 2010— -- On the first day of what she called the "best family vacation ever," Jill Dulitsky put her BlackBerry in a desk drawer. Dulitsky, the owner of two Hyundai dealerships in central Connecticut, relies on technology to keep her business on track. "I'm usually connected from the minute I wake up until the minute I go to bed," she says.
But on this vacation last summer, she resolved to check her e-mail just once a day. "The landing can be a little harder if you don't check at all," she says. "At first it was hard to resist. But as the days went by, it got easier and easier to let go. A huge reason for that was because of where we were."
Where they were was the Tyler Place, an all-inclusive family resort set on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont (see WeJustGotBack.com's review) that has been run by the Tyler family for 76 years. Though best known for its award-winning children's programs, the Tyler Place also offers impressive adult programming, borne from a conviction that parents need a vacation just as much -- if not more -- than their kids do.
"Our programming is all about creating more couple time and quality family time," says Pixley Tyler Hill, whose mother founded the resort in 1934. "The concept is dependent on getting everyone outside, being active and thinking." That means low-tech activities, she says, "not gadgets, electrotoys, or arcades."
For children, a vacation at the Tyler Place is a carefree week filled with classic games like Capture the Flag and Kick the Can, bouncing on the giant water trampoline in the lake, catching frogs and fishing. There are crafts and nature hikes and silly camp songs, kayaking and banana boat rides, ziplining across the meadow, and poling across the bay on homemade log rafts, Huck Finn-style.
Grown-ups, meanwhile, get to have plenty of fun for themselves. In the morning, they can go hiking, biking or kayaking; learn to sail; get a massage; take a pottery, yoga, tennis, or low-ropes class; or just kick back in a hammock with a good book. Families reunite for several hours of free time every afternoon. Then, come early evening, the kids return to their groups for movie nights and pizza parties, while parents head up to the inn for cocktails and dinner. Meals are so good that Rachael Ray came here to shoot a segment for the Food Channel.
What guests can not do very easily at the Tyler Place is telecommute while on vacation. Their rustic cottages have no phones or TVs, and wi-fi is limited to a few hotspots. "Just so you know," the resort's general information sheet admonishes, "we charge an outrageous amount for incoming and outgoing faxes because it is a nuisance and you are supposed to be on vacation!"
