BOOK YOUR ESCAPE

Postcard Cabins

Features | Partnerships

Win a Mini-Moon with Getaway + Coffee Meets Bagel

By Postcard Cabins -

One of the tough realities of COVID-19 is that so many meaningful moments have been crossed off the calendar. We’ve had to find work arounds for all kinds of events, from casual happy hours to birthday parties to one of life’s most important occasions: weddings.

Couples everywhere have faced the difficult decision of whether to cancel and reschedule their big day, or to take it virtual in a meaningful way. Some have chosen private ceremonies with parties down the line, some have picked an entirely new date to tie the knot, while others are swapping guest lists for Zoom e-vites, photo booths for web cams, and honeymoons for staycations. In the end, what matters is two people who love each other, finding a way to honor their commitment with those that love them.

We met Sophia and David through Coffee Meets Bagel, which is where they met each other three years ago. Though they had to cancel their IRL wedding in favor of a virtual one, they had high spirits and a make-the-best-of-things attitude, even in the midst of reshuffling everything they’d planned for so long. When the founders of Coffee Meets Bagel heard their story they decided to surprise them during their live-streamed reception with a little wedding gift.

We’re thrilled to partner with Coffee Meets Bagel to give Sophia and David—as well as 10 other amazing couples whose weddings and/or honeymoons have been affected by COVID-19—a 2-night mini-moon at a Getaway Outpost of their choice. Celebrating love and joy in a time when we feel isolated from each other keeps us connected. So, even though you can’t celebrate like you planned, we still want to find a way to celebrate you.

Win a Getaway Weekend 

Has your wedding or honeymoon been derailed because of COVID-19? Apply to win a mini-moon in the form of a 2-night stay at one of our cozy cabins. Picture this: you, your partner, maybe your dog, a roaring campfire, a stunning view, and no notifications, no stress—just nature.

And don’t worry—your booking doesn’t have to be for an immediate stay. Though we’re open at select locations and have taken considerable actions to ensure our Outposts are safe for ours guests and our team, we encourage you to book for a time when you feel comfortable with traveling. If that’s ASAP, we’re ready for you. If it’s later, we can’t wait to have you. 

Learn more about the COVID-19 precautions we’re taking. 

How do I apply?

We’re offering this 2-night Getaway stay to up to 10 randomly chosen couples who meet the qualifications. Here’s what you’ll need to be eligible. 

  • Fill out this application
  • Describe how your wedding or honeymoon was cancelled or rescheduled due to COVID-19 
  • If chosen, you’ll need to provide proof of cancellation or rescheduling 
  • Link to your social media accounts 
  • Meet the May 5th, 2020 deadline

And that’s all there is to it! We’ll reach out to you if you and your partner are selected. 

There’s nothing fun about canceling, but seeing couples make the most of this situation has been inspiring to us at Getaway and at Coffee Meets Bagel. We hope these Getaway weekends will be something you can add to the calendar to look forward to. 

Features

How They Getaway: Single Mom Stacie Galiger

By Postcard Cabins -

One of our favorite things to do is read all of our guest feedback after Getaway trips—there are so many different folks who get away for different reasons, but all with the same goal of spending time with loved ones or alone out in nature.

Stacie Galiger is a math teacher at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia who wrote in about the challenges of being a single mom, and so we reached out to chat education, travel and single parenting. She’s been a teacher for sixteen years, and when her husband died her kids were two, five and eight years old. 

“One of the things that terrified me the most about being a Single Mom was the fear that I wouldn’t be able to raise my daughters the way I had always envisioned—with lots of adventures, wild time and travel!

I didn’t want them to grow up feeling like their childhood had been compromised by our circumstances so I vowed to do whatever I could to raise them hiking, camping, paddling, climbing and exploring,”

Outdoor activities are natural de-stressors. The combined benefits of being in the outdoors with physical exercise is a double win; Stacie runs as a stress reliever and has done half marathons and other races in the past. She lives minimally and intentionally—her and her girls don’t have a TV and the three of them share a room and often have dance parties:

“Music is really important to me and helps me with everything from running faster, to calm down, to having dance parties with my kids! So Spotify premium is a splurge I love. The Discover Weekly playlists feel like a gift I get every week and I create playlists for pretty much everything,”

Hiking with the girls. Photo by Stacie Galiger.

Note: we’re big fans of playlists for drives, too. While technology has made life simpler in ways we don’t even think about anymore (imagine life before the iPod or without the ease of creating playlists) it has profoundly changed the way we live, and the way we educate:

“We have so many resources and are literally connected to the world from anywhere. It’s exciting, but I think it’s also changed the role of the teacher from one who disseminates information to a mentor who helps students find and discern the facts themselves. Our role to teach students to think critically has never been more important.”

Thinking critically is increasingly important in an era where we’re constantly moving, scrolling and always checking for the next notification or update. It’s also good to just pay attention, and Stacie’s tip for keeping balance in her own life is true to this spirit: “I try to get outside and really pay attention to everything as much as possible. Even if it’s just walking to dog around the block, I take the time to look at the moon or listen to birds while I do”. 

“I try to get outside and really pay attention to everything as much as possible. Even if it’s just walking to dog around the block, I take the time to look at the moon or listen to birds while I do”.

Here are her top tips for single parents who want to travel with their kids and get outside:

  1. Always pack snacks. This is such an important family rule that I painted it on our living room wall. Most travel meltdowns (child and adult) are caused by hanger and impatience. No one makes good decisions or is good company while hungry! When you’re on the road, you never know when and where you’ll be able to stop for food so always have some energy bars, nuts, dried fruit, etc.
  2. Do your research ahead of time. When I was young and had no little people depending on me it was fun and exciting to get lost on a dirt road in Costa Rica, arrive in Prague without plans or reservations, and have no idea how I was getting from the airport to my friend’s apartment in Ireland. Now it’s really important and helpful to know what’s around us when we travel. I still love spontaneous stops and side adventures, but with three little kids depending on me all the time I feel much more comfortable going into things having some ideas about the locations we are headed to.
  3. Don’t be afraid to change plans, adjust expectations and ask for help. I’m super stubborn so this was a hard one for me, but the bottom line is if the parent is stressed out the kids aren’t going to have a good experience. Getting out there is important and valuable and even if things don’t go to plan remind yourself that you’re doing the best you can and if the kids are having a good time and learning, that’s what’s important.  

A big thank you to Stacie for all of her insight—you can follow her and her adventures on her blog here.

If you’re interested in contributing or being featured in our Journal, reach out to us at [email protected].

Features | Partnerships

Columbia x Getaway General Store 

By Postcard Cabins -

Just in time for the colder weather, we partnered with Columbia late this fall to open a one-of-a-kind pop-up experience at our Western Catskills Outpost where guests could try on the new gear in Columbia’s Omni-Heat Infinity collection. 

The jackets, available in men’s and women’s sizes, are engineered to reflect and retain natural body heat, so guests could stay warm while exploring all our Outpost had to offer. 

Miss the Columbia pop-up in the Catskills? You can still get your Omni-Heat Infinity Collection jacket HERE to keep you warm during all your outdoor adventures this winter.

For Your Free Time

Wellness Tip: Create No-Phone Zones

By Postcard Cabins -

Entering the National Radio Quiet Zone, which stretches 13,000 square miles across eastern West Virginia, you might feel like you’ve stepped back in time. There’s no cell service, no Wi-Fi, and the radio only picks up the lowest-frequency stations.

The zone surrounds and protects the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, where the massive Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope tracks and reads energy waves from stars in galaxies thousands of light-years away.

The community is so serious about disconnection that it even has “RFI Policemen,” roving disconnection cops who come after anyone who produces any radio frequency interference.

Tech-free spaces have flourished in recent years. Some are one-off gimmicks like Kit Kat’s “Free No-WiFi Zone” campaign. Others are more immersive, like the London restaurant the Bunyadi, which banned phones, turned off the electricity, illuminated tables by candlelight, cooked food over an open fire, and even banned clothes. (Perhaps too far for some of us.)

Here are a few key times and spaces to create no-phone zones in your home:

1. Drive Time 

We already know we shouldn’t be texting, browsing, or dialing while at the wheel. Here’s the next step: Even if you’re just along for the ride, try locking your phone away. How many friendships have been forged in the idle time on road trips? How many family challenges have surfaced on rides home from school? How many new ideas pop up while staring out the window at passing scenery?

2. TV Time 

If you’re in the habit of scrolling through your phone while streaming Netflix, you’re not alone: According to a 2018 study, over 178 million Americans report using another device while in front of the TV. This is known as media-multitasking, and neuroscientists warn that it’s bad for our brains. In tests of attention and working memory, heavy media multitaskers perform notably worse than those who stick to a single screen. So savor leisure — and save your memory — by watching one thing at a time. 

3. Dinner Time 

For millennia, humans have connected with one another over shared meals. Having phones out at the table — even if we’re not actively engaging with them — diminishes the quality of our interactions by suggesting that our attention could be drawn away at any time. Banish phones to restore the dinner table as a site of emotional, intellectual, and physical nourishment.

4. Bed Time 

There are lots of good reasons to keep our phones far away from our beds: The screen’s blue light disrupts our body’s melatonin production; the addictive allure of social media keeps us scrolling mindlessly past our bedtimes; the way phones distract us from downtime with our partners; the non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation they emit that our body tissue absorb… Here’s a tip: If you use your phone alarm to wake up in the morning, swap it for a physical alarm clock.

Need a phone-free zone? Book Your Getaway today.

Features

The Right to Disconnect

By Postcard Cabins -

New York, the city that never sleeps, is set to introduce a bill that would allow employees the right to disconnect from ‘electronic communications’ after work hours. Proposed on March 22 by Rafael Espinal, this bill would make it illegal to force employees to check and respond to email while they aren’t on the clock.

This is a huge step towards countering the 24/7 culture we’ve come to accept as normal and what I’ve called the ‘Great Spillover’—the line between work and life has become so blurred that we’re answering emails during dinner with loved ones and we’re watching cat videos during meetings.

European countries have already established similar laws. France, on the first day of January in 2017, passed a ‘right to disconnect’ law that required companies to establish hours where staff should not send or answer emails, in order to prevent burnout. Studies have shown that people who respond to work emails after 9 pm actually experience lower quality sleep.

At Getaway, our first core tenet of how we work is to build the counterbalance. Our mission is driven by the fact that the digital age has created a gross imbalance in our lives. We are here to be a counterbalance to others, and we believe in finding that balance in our own lives—which includes work. Our meetings always have an agenda and each of our teams have protected ‘production mornings’ where Slack, email and instant messages are banned.

Protecting our daily routines is good, but the spillover effect impacts our vacation time as well.

A whopping 61% of Americans don’t use all of their vacation time, which is why we have a mandatory vacation policy at Getaway.

Daily rest at home after work is important, but real vacations to relieve the mind and inspire creativity is crucial as well.

As the importance of off-time becomes more apparent and needed, I hope to see more and more companies enforcing vacation rather than having a loose ‘unlimited vacation’ policy that can dangerously slip into a culture where no vacation is taken at all. This is where the importance of culture reigns: because even if the ‘right-to-disconnect’ bill passes in New York, it requires buy-in from employers and employees alike to commit to stop checking emails past bedtime and to get a little more sleep.

Find cabins near New York. 

Continue reading “The Right to Disconnect”

Features

The Importance of Solo Travel

By Postcard Cabins -

Companionship is vital for the human experience. Human interaction, whether it’s chatting, sharing laughs, or hugging, has been shown to increase happiness and lengthen lifespans. That’s why disconnection is so important- for enjoying time with the people around you and building deeper, more meaningful connections together.

That’s not to say, however, that we never need time alone. We need to create time to connect both with others and ourselves. Science has shown that overcivilization can hurt our mental health. While connecting with another person is irreplaceable, sometimes we just need the space to recharge on our own.

Solo Cabin

It’s a frequent discussion topic here at Getaway that we don’t give ourselves enough time to be bored. Boredom is how children develop their interests and their sense of self, but we rarely experience that in adulthood. We are all part of an an over-busy, overworked culture, which seldom gives us the privilege of feeling bored.

It can be incredibly valuable to experience doing absolutely nothing with another person, but sometimes it’s hard to get there. When you getaway together, you have each other to keep you entertained, so you might not give yourself the space to be truly disengaged. When you’re with someone you love and care for, you probably want to ensure the other person is enjoying themselves.

It’s wonderful to take pleasure in someone’s else happiness, but you can’t neglect your own either. It’s a fine line that we all struggle with. Focusing purely on another person’s enjoyment can distract from your own ability to relax and release stress.

Take the Space to Be Alone

Not being able to interact with anyone else forces you to engage more fully with yourself and your surroundings, especially if you’re willing to put away your phone. You have more time to truly focus on your own thoughts and you have the space to truly do nothing. Take the time to ponder which parts of your life fill you with joy and how to healthily incorporate that into your daily life.

The space to be alone and think also gives you time to build confidence. While it can be a little disconcerting at first, allowing yourself to be truly alone allows you to focus on yourself. Slowly you’ll feel more and more at ease and this ability to be comfortable around yourself helps to grow and build and confidence.

Escaping from the hectic lives we lead is healthy for everyone, from solo travelers to couples to families. It can be the best thing possible for your relationship, but you can only have healthy relationships with others once you feel more solid with yourself. Challenge yourself by getting away on your own, truly being alone with your surroundings, and growing from it.

For Your Free Time

Plan A Phone Free Day

By Postcard Cabins -

From the moment our (smartphone) alarm goes off to mindlessly scrolling before bed, we often spend our waking hours tethered to our phones. That’s why every Getaway cabin comes with a cellphone lockbox, so guests can experience the relief of true disconnection.

To inspire you turn off notifications and enjoy more free time, we’ve gathered tips from the Getaway team to help you plan a full day, phone-free.

Morning Workout
“I like to start my day with long run and just listen to the sounds outside. I’m also a fan of this outdoor workout by Coach Cam inspired by Getaway’s tiny cabins in the woods.”
Jamie, Writer, Los Angles

Get Creative
“I make soaps and candles. I started creating outdoor-themed scents like musk, moss, pine, and amber, so I can bring the outside… in!”
Rachel, Community, Las Vegas

Take a Nature Break
“I love to unplug and explore local beaches with my dog Pickles. Afterward, we curl up on the couch, put a record on, and relax with a glass of wine (for me) and treats for Pickles.”
Chris, Community, Kauneonga Lake, NJ

Make a Meal
“My husband and I have a big cookbook collection that was gathering dust, so now each week we pick one recipe to make. It’s a fun way to spend time together and try something new.”
Rachel, Marketing, Brooklyn, NY

Read + Relax
“I use a real alarm clock and charge my phone across the room. I no longer spend the last moments of my day scrolling, but instead reading a book, enjoying lavender face oil, or falling asleep to music.”
Julianna, Graphic Design, Location Independent

Ready to take a break from technology? Book your Getaway today.

Boston | Local Guides | Nature

Best Places to Take Your Dog Outside of Boston

By Postcard Cabins -

We sent guest writer Laurence Holyoak on a mission, along with her pup, to discover the best places to bring your dog outside of Boston. Take some time and enjoy her report on her adventures.

Rounding up a list of the best places to bring your dog outside of Boston has been my pup’s favorite assignment of the year. We tested many areas, hiked trails, swam in ponds and mucked through swamps to bring you a list of the most beautiful parks to explore with your pooch. With foliage season around the corner, this list will not disappoint.

Callahan State Park, Framingham
~39 minute drive from Boston

This park is hands-down the most dog friendly place I have ever visited. Dogs can run off-leash to their heart’s content and they have an entire group of people working to keep it that way. The Callahan Dog Owners Group, who’s board is appropriately made up of all dogs, has made it their mission to make Callahan State Park the best multi-use park in the Massachusetts State Park System. They strive to keep a safe, clean environment for all who use it.

Callahan ticks all of my boxes for a good place to bring your dog- there is nearly 100 acres of open fields to romp, two rivers to dip into, a giant network of trails to hike and a nice pond for swimming. With over 800 acres to cover, your dog will never get bored.

There are three parking areas to enter Callahan State Park, but for the dog park, you want to use the south entrance located at 311 Millwood Street. Once you cross the field, you will see Packard Pond. Grab a trail map, because the trails are not very well marked. Over 85% of the park’s visitors will have off-leash dogs, which is something to keep in mind if your dog is not very dog-friendly.  

Great Brook Farm State Park, Carlisle
~36 minute drive from Boston

This was my favorite of all of the parks I visited. Great Brook Farm is such a perfectly serene area.. There is a main trail that leads around a large pond called the Pine Point Loop. No getting lost, no maps needed, just one big circle. There are many offshoots of this main trail, so you can explore more as you get to know the area. My dog loved running off leash and since we were off the beaten track, we had the place almost all to ourselves. A place to swim is a must for my island dog and he loved being able to take a dip whenever he wanted. I loved the diversity of walking from a pine forest, through a swamp, to a meadow, ending up at another pond. Bring a towel for your pooch, because he will come out dirty on the other end.

To find the trailhead, follow North Road once you enter the park. Bypass the main parking area a quarter-mile and look for a small parking lot on your right hand side. This is also a canoe launch. You can pick up the trail system here. The cherry on top is that there is an ice cream stand on the property.

Noanet Woodlands, Dover
~34 minute drive from Boston

The Noanet Woodlands is owned by the Trustees of the Reservation, which means there is a $5 fee for a day pass. I would recommend parking at Powisset Street and walking the Peabody Loop (blue blaze) which takes about 45 minutes. This will lead you through some beautiful wooded trails passing three ponds along the way. Be sure to detour up Noanet Peak (yellow blaze), to get a beautiful view of the Boston skyline. The trails are very well marked, but grab a trail map so you don’t get turned around. There are over 17 miles of trails to explore here, allowing you to visit again and again. I was there in the late afternoon and heard a barred owl warming up his vocal cords for that night’s performance. It is amazing to be so lost in nature when you are just outside of a major city. Dogs must be kept on a leash at all times.

Rocky Woods, Medfield
~38 minute drive from Boston

This is another Trustees of the Reservation property, which means that same $5 parking fee apply. This park is a part of the Green Dogs Program, which is an innovative approach to meeting dogs desire to have time off-leash, while sharing the space with other park users in the community. This means that there are designated trails for off-leash romping, which are usually located on the outskirts. You dog is welcome on the other trails, but must be on leash. The rules of each trail are well-marked so there is no confusion. As a person who once walked a caution dog, I can appreciate having a bit of both.

We chose to do the 1.5 mile yellow loop trail and loved crossing the narrow footbridge that cuts through Echo Pond. As my dog ran along the water’s edge, he caused a chain reaction of giant bullfrogs to jump off the bank back to the safety of the water. He thought it was the best game ever.

Sabine Woods, Groton
~54 minute drive from Boston

In Groton, MA you can find a beautiful wildlife sanctuary called Sabine Woods. After you cross the bridge, your dog can be off leash. I usually bear to the right, cross the field and walk until I reach the river. There is a trail that runs along the bank of the Nashua River. I love how the trees lean over the water, each leaf straining to get a piece of sunlight. In the spring, tree frogs will serenade you from the vernal pools just within the forest.

Throughout the sanctuary, you will find some neat statues and monuments. The park is well maintained like a nature reserve. The public access trail will eventually end at the Groton Boat House where you will have to turn back and retrace your steps. On a hot day, your dog will love running down to the banks of the river to get a drink or cool off.

Remember to be respectful and clean up after your dog. Have fun exploring.

Laurence Holyoak is a writer for Journeys and Jaunts which gives weekly inspiration for traveling with kids and dogs. She lives with her three children, two rescued dogs and two cats. Her mission is to show her kids, including her dogs, the world.

For more inspiration for traveling with your dog, visit Journeys and Jaunts here.

Find cabins near Boston.