Perhaps you are unable or unwilling to join the migrating tourists and need some new excuses to replace the ones you have already used, namely: airport hassles; airline hassles;TSA hassles; border hassles; intestinal issues; the low loonie; the high risks; yellow vests; green algae blooms and nasty political problems (e.g. if you were planning to visit Abuja, Caracas, or especially Washington, for which, if the U.S. State Department was still in operation, there would likely be a Travel Advisory.)
If those reasons are not enough to lower the peer pressure you know you will feel when the tanned people return, or if your spouse is not content with being couch-bound during this gloomy and cold period, remind him or her, or ze or zir, or whomever, of the exoticism of the things that can be found locally and of the foreign objects in your very own neighbourhood (or county if you feel adventurous), and also read them this:
“Martin Martin, the traveller and writer who in the 1690s set sail to explore the Scottish coastline, knew that one does not need to displace oneself vastly in space in order to find difference. “It is a piece of weakness and folly merely to value things because of their distance from the place in which we were born,’ he wrote in 1697, ‘thus men have travelled far enough in the search of foreign plants and animals, and yet continue strangers to those produced in their own natural climate.” So did Roger Deakin: “Why would anyone want to go live abroad when they can live in several countries at once just by being in England?’ [Canada]. Likewise, Henry David Thoreau: An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.’
Source:
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane, Penguin Books, pp.78-79 & p.381.
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