In a world that never stops spinning faster, more of us are choosing the quiet rebellion of returning to the very same holiday – year after year after year.
Every December, like clockwork, Jason Greene bundles his four children into the car in New York City and points it north towards the snowy fairy-tale village of Mont Tremblant in Quebec. For fifteen winters now they have done the same dance: arrive, devour maple syrup frozen onto wooden sticks, lace up ice skates, raid the old-fashioned candy shop, then collapse into the same chalet.
“We know exactly which table in the crêperie has the best view of the mountain,” he laughs. “We even fight over who gets the bedroom with the slanted ceiling that smells faintly of pine.”
Jason is not alone in his devotion. Quietly, almost secretly, a growing tribe of travellers has stopped chasing the new. Instead of ticking off bucket lists, they are deepening grooves in the map: the same Greek island, the same Cornish fishing village, the same tiny Alpine hotel with the creaky lift and the landlady who still leaves a bottle of sloe gin on the dressing table.
Dr Charlotte Russell, a clinical psychologist who spends her days untangling modern anxiety, sees this not as laziness but as clever self-preservation. “When everyday life feels unpredictable (work deadlines, political noise, the sheer velocity of change), returning to a place where you already know the Wi-Fi password and which café does the proper flat white can feel like slipping into a warm bath,” she says. “Your nervous system exhales.”
I know the feeling intimately. Last May I flew back to Lima, Peru, exactly one year after my first visit. Same boutique hotel in Barranco, same weathered wooden stool at my favourite sandwich joint, same gang of street cats who remembered me with alarming accuracy and resumed their occupation of my lap. Nothing dramatic happened, and that was the entire point. For ten days the world slowed to the speed of pisco sours and coastal fog.
In Athens, sociology professor Rebecca Tiger has just booked her ninth trip to the same neighbourhood of Pangrati. “I have a local baker who now starts buttering my croissant before I’ve even reached the counter,” she says, grinning. “There’s a cat called Captain who escorts me to the same taverna every night. I’ve become part of someone else’s daily scenery, and there is something deeply comforting about that.”
The numbers back up the anecdotes. Priceline’s latest report found that 73 per cent of us are pulled back to places that shaped us (childhood beaches, teenage road-trip towns, the campsite where we first kissed someone). More than half of parents now deliberately revisit destinations from their own youth so their children can build the same memories in the same sand.
Yet the repeat visitors I spoke to are not stuck in a loop. Rebecca still discovers new mountain villages on Crete. Jason’s children, now teenagers, have started sneaking off-piste trails their father has never dared. Even I, creature of habit, rarely watch the same Fulham match from the same seat twice (new football grounds are my acceptable vice).
Dr Russell calls this the sweet spot: enough familiarity to lower cortisol levels, enough newness to keep the brain’s reward circuits from flatlining. Cross the line into total replication, though, and hedonic adaptation creeps in (the emotional equivalent of no longer noticing the new-car smell). The trick, it seems, is to treat your beloved destination like a long-term lover: cherish the rituals, but keep finding new ways to fall in love.
Back in Mont Tremblant, Jason’s eldest daughter has just announced that next year she wants to try dog-sledding at night under the Northern Lights (something the family has never done). Jason pretends to grumble about change, then secretly books it the moment she looks away.
Because that, perhaps, is the real magic of the repeated holiday: it is never quite the same twice. Children grow taller than the height chart scratched into the chalet doorframe. Favourite waiters become friends. The light shifts, the menu gets one new dish, and suddenly the place you thought you knew surprises you all over again.
In an era that sells us relentless novelty, choosing the familiar is not retreat (it’s quiet revolution). It’s saying: here is somewhere the world cannot speed up or monetise or break. Here is somewhere that knows my coffee order, my silly traditions, the rhythm of my heart.
And once a year, that is more than enough adventure for anyone.
Source: BBC