Love - mountains, lakes and desolation. Austrian alps, South Island of NZ and iceland particularly. But theme parks also…go figure.
Hate - cruises, classic mediterranean package holiday locations and staying with anyone else.
European River cruises are enjoyable, if you want to take your hotel room with you. I’ve been on two with my Mother. Enjoyed the Rhine and Mosel…not so much the Moscow to St. Petersburg.
I’m in the U.S. (Ohio). The only vacation I’ve truly enjoyed was when my son and I spent a week on a small lake up in Ontario in 2019. Just loved zooming around on the lake in the small boat, exploring islands, fishing, hiking, etc. Had the lake practically all to ourselves.
We spent two weeks in New Zealand. A beautiful country. But it was with my in-laws, and unfortunately they were in charge of daily activities. Would love to go back, though.
I don’t like big cities. Too many people. The worse was when we went to Singapore. Hated it.
I also can’t stand beaches. I find them incredibly boring and pointless.
I have never been on a cruise. I know I would hate it, and hence have zero desire to go on one.
A lot of people around here go to Florida for vacation. I’ve been to Florida a few times for work, and it perplexes me that someone would want to go there for vacation. I don’t understand the appeal.
I lived there for 18-ish years - I don’t get the appeal either!
Close to home I love spending 3-4 days at Point Reyes. There are a couple of centrally-located places that I stay at, one has A-frame cabins in a little valley and the other has rooms on Tomales Bay. Great scenery, forests, beaches, coastal bluffs, lots of hiking and biking opportunities and wild life. There are some great places to eat in the area and I usually drive up to Bodega Bay one day to have my favorite clam chowder for lunch.
Further south I really enjoy staying multiple days at the Kon Tiki Inn (all oceanfront rooms) at Pismo beach. It’s so relaxing with the sound of the ocean always in the background. I usually cruise over to Montana de Oro for a hike and stop by Morro Bay to buy some smoked albacore. There’s also a nice bike ride out to Avila Beach and Port San Luis…
I used to love staying in Springdale UT and spending time in Zion but the last couple of times it’s been so crowded that visiting wasn’t really much fun at all.
Unlike most of you I love the big city for a vacation. Have many great memories of New York, London, Paris, and especially, Tokyo.
I hate the beach. Unfortunately my extended family loves it so we meet at one every few years.
We’re planning to do one next year. Which city to which city was yours? We’ve been to St. Petersburg and wouldn’t do a cruise in Russia since I wouldn’t want to give Putin my money.
Some of these were just overnights and a few were destinations; Texarkana, Hot Springs, Memphis, Bowling Green, Lebanon, and Sandusky, OH. Managed to spend time in the Corvette Museum, the Erie waterfront, Glacier grooves on Kelley Island, Put-in Bay, a few random wine bars and a lot of wandering in small town squares.
My favorite places are mostly in the mountains. A couple weeks in Glacier National Park would be heaven to me.
On the whole, East Coast beaches remind me of deserts - it just seems like there’s usually a mile of sand in between the boardwalk or whatever, and the water. Slathering sunscreen, and lugging umbrellas and coolers across the sand was never my idea of a good time.
However, our favorite beach house on Anna Maria Island isn’t like that. The island is on the gulf coast of Florida, and the house is on the bay side of the island. The water is maybe 30 feet from the back door, and there are shade trees right next to the water.
Now that’s the way to do beaches.
Thinking about what RickJay said about tent camping, I’m 67 and haven’t been tent camping in decades, so I probably wouldn’t be as fond of it now. But I really enjoyed it when I was in my 20s and 30s. It gives you a lot of flexibility that you don’t have with regular lodgings. In fact, a lot of the places I’ve camped didn’t have indoor accommodations. Or at particularly popular places, you might have to get a room reservation months in advance, but you could drive up and get a campsite. And even a lot of places where booking a room was no problem, the campsites were a lot closer to where I wanted to be hiking.
Also, much more affordable when you’re on a grad student budget!
We took the Firebug to WDW a couple of times when he was young. Of all the places I’ve ever been, it had easily the highest ratio of time spent in line (or trying to figure out where you might find a line that wasn’t intolerably long) to time actually doing the sorts of things you came there to do.
I’ve been to other theme parks, and while I’m still not crazy about them, most of them aren’t too bad. I’d rather be at work than go to Disney.
My ideal vacation would have two main criteria:
no motors.
no people (except my immediate family and/or very best friends).
This explains why I stay home on my farm in the forest.
Maybe it’s a lagging indicator, but per your link, their current hospitalization rate is 20/100,000 which is 24th among the 50 states+DC. So middle of the pack - which is a genuine improvement over where it’s been, but still not exactly low. (I don’t trust case rates, because so much depends on the level of diligence that goes into identifying them, and I expect DeSantis to fudge any numbers that are fudgeable.)
That’s not going to keep me out of Florida; it’s where the in-laws are. I’ll be there in less than two weeks for my FIL’s 80th birthday party. But I’m bringing my N95 masks - we’ll be in Trump country, and that’s Covid country.
We’ll be in Ocala 2 weeks from tomorrow to visit my inlaws - not for an occasion, but so my husband can see his parents, perhaps the last time before they die. His father is in really bad shape (including early Alzheimer’s), his mom is virtually blind with a heart condition, and they refuse to move, so we expect bad news every time the phone rings. Definitely not a vacation.
That’s interesting because we didn’t experience that at all, but then, timing and luck would affect that.
Ideal - a Western European city like Paris or Helsinki or Geneva or Berlin - alive with art, history and culture. Bustling with people. And good food and drink.
Worst - a cruise ship. I can’t think of a worse thing to purposefully do on vacation.
A cruise ship sounds like hell. Stuck on a boat where if you get nauseous or sick there is no escape, crammed into small places with thousands of people who only want to get drunk and eat.
A beach vacation where all you do is lay around sounds incredibly boring. I don’t know why people spend so much money to go somewhere nice and just sit there doing nothing.
Anything where the main purpose seems to be drinking is someplace I have no desire to ever be.
My best vacations are spent in vacation cottages in or near farmland and wilderness areas. They’re a home base from which to go out for daily road trips in interesting places of natural beauty.
A worst vacation would be the “standing in line” type, or the “crowd in with lots of yelling drunks” type - in other words, an amusement park, a party beach area, or a casino.
I like to visit big cities and see sights of historical or architectural interest, but not for long. I start getting sensory overload in situations like that. I also hate hotels because they’re noisy.
It might appear I’m doing nothing, but I’m actually relaxing. Listening to the sound of the surf, reading, smoking dope, drinking beer, but above all relaxing.
I lived in Albuquerque for a spell while mystery writer Tony Hillerman was still alive. He was a big local favorite, and they were always interviewing him. He said one time that his wife could not scold him for laying about on the couch, because she could never be sure whether he was working out his next plot in his mind or just being a bum.
Before I took my first cruise, it didn’t sound appealing, but we were given the trip, so there wasn’t a lot to lose. I have since been on 3 different cruise lines and a total of 6 cruises (plus 2 more booked for next year.) My husband and I don’t drink, so we didn’t hang in the bars and didn’t encounter drunks. We don’t gamble, so apart from walking thru the casino and maybe dropping a quarter in a slot machine, we didn’t hang there. And we didn’t eat constantly, but it is fun getting to try things that are new and unfamiliar to us.
We also get to see a variety of performers that we’d not have encountered otherwise - some great, some horrible, but all included in the fare. And honestly, apart from the times we were getting off or on the ship, we weren’t aware of how many passengers were aboard. Certainly it never felt as crowded to me as various Disney parks.
I know it’s not for everyone - this thread shows that - but it also isn’t necessarily the hell on earth that some people think. Especially if you pick times, destinations, and cruise lines that wouldn’t appeal to families with kids. Not that I can convince my brother and one of my sisters of that - so they can stay home and watch my cats while I cruise. 
Definitely this. Even when I was a teen, I didn’t understand why my friends thought it was fun to sunbathe all day (skin cancer aside.) My mom, on the other hand, loves to sit on a beach under an umbrella with a cold beverage and a pile of books. I didn’t inherit that gene.
Did one cruise. A group of us went for a friends 40th birthday.
The food sucked and they started running out of beer because the boat was full of a bunch of spring breakers. There was a medical emergency and they had to steam towards a Coast Guard station at full speed so the Helicopter could reach the ship. The captain came on and said that that full speed trip damaged an engine, and we limped into port a day late and of course had to rebook our flights and get a hotel room.
And they said they where going to close down the bars because they where overdue (???). About caused a riot.
Whenever the captain comes on the intercom, expect bad news.
Sucked.