Pack your bags, grab your GPS and get ready to stay-cate! With gas prices higher than the scariest rides at Six Flags, by the time you drive to your favorite theme park you won’t be able to afford to get in. Turn your vacation into a “stay-cation” and reinvest the money you’d spend on gas driving to your favorite summer spots in vacation destinations in your own backyard.
“Everyone in the summer gets in the habit of going somewhere,” said Adam Yeazel, executive director at the Urbana Business Association. “Gas is more expensive and money is tighter, and you have to stop and think, ‘Is there something to do locally to get a night away from home?’”
Downtown Champaign lit up at night.
The Urbana Business Association recently launched their Shop Local campaign, which aims to answer “yes” to that question. The main goal is to encourage people to be more aware of the businesses in the community and to put their money back into their hometown.
By returning the money people would spend elsewhere to the community, people can help local businesses that are already facing stiff competition from their web competitors. While there is no way to precisely measure the impact of shopping locally, the goal of the campaign is simply to make people aware of their business decisions and hopefully change people’s actions in the future.
“People have inadvertently fallen into the habit of convenience,” Yeazel said. “People don’t mean to injure local businesses, but we’re just reminding people, ‘Hey, don’t forget about businesses in your backyard.”
The idea of the stay-cation has caught on rapidly in recent months and years, and it’s for more reasons than helping the business community or cutting the price of gas. With a boom in attractions available in the past 10 years combined with the extra hassles and costs of other modes of transportation, stay-cations are becoming a common practice.
Champaign-Urbana and the surrounding areas offer a wide array of attractions that locals often don’t even think of. Whether it’s going to a new restaurant followed by a hotel, catching a show at Krannert or taking in the views at Allerton Park, the options have only increased over the past 10 years.
Allerton Park and Retreat Center in Champaign.
“There’s been an explosive growth in local venues,” said Jim Zimmerman, from Escape Locally, a local travel website. “There’s been a lot of development in markets that have created these opportunities for people.”
Escape Locally helps people find experiences in the community to match their interests. The site offers packages with no markup rate (and occasionally a discounted rate) for people to explore new vacation options in their area.
“We try to work with all the mom-and-pop places and cool unique restaurants to provide experiences unique to the area,” said Zimmerman.
So whether it is for a few hours or a few days, Champaign-Urbana offers a unique vacation that is close to home. Forget about buying the plane tickets, cleaning the car or trying to navigate stacks of maps, and instead, actually relax on your next vacation. Who knows what you might find!
As Zimmerman said, “It’s amazing how little people know about what’s in their own backyard.”