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Guest Stories

A Weekend to Be Off at Getaway Big Bear

By Postcard Cabins -

Last month, we welcomed Getaway guest Allie to our Outpost just two hours outside of LA. It was just the reset she needed, from the stresses of work, traffic, and just generally having to be on.

After a taxing day at work and I am on my daily commute, sitting on the freeway, I wish I could just close my eyes and make everything around me disappear. Obviously, that would be extremely dangerous, so I just end up imagining a more uncomplicated life. A life where I could lock up my phone, look into the forest, and feel like I am truly home. It may seem like a weird concept—for somewhere you may have never been to feel like home, but it is in nature where our true, primal, human bodies are meant to exist. We are meant to be void of electronics and gadgets, and ultimately to live amongst the resources of our extraordinary planet.

I needed to get back home and I am eternally grateful that Getaway made this instinctual need of mine so accessible. My friend and I ventured through the mountainside into Running Springs, where a community of Getaway cabins are located. As we got closer to our destination we felt welcomed by golden rays sifting through the trees and the open landscapes which surround us. Prior to arriving, inspiration lingers in the crisp air, preparing us for the journey ahead.

getaway big bear

Once we pull up to our cabin, we fall in love with the beautifully crafted exterior and interior, the Getaway cabins are truly everything you have ever dreamed of— simplicity at its finest. The most gasp-worthy feature has to be the window which covers the entire wall and faces out into the forest. It almost seems as if the landscape is a large mural, and once I see the burnt- orange leaves flutter and fall, I begin to understand that nature is undeniably the most beautiful art.

While on our voyage we hiked mountain side trails where there were towering pines and where we received visions of our planet that would forever be imprinted into our memories. After a strenuous day in the forest we were grateful for our Getaway House to provide the necessities we needed to unwind.

So often we talk about escaping, but I argue that what we really yearn for is a moment of return. In the age of digital distraction we need to come back to nature, to thrive in the environment we were created to be in. Getaway’s mission is to do just that, all while making the experience comfortable and convenient.

Find cabins near Los Angeles.

Features

College Life + The Paradox of ‘Self-Care’ in an Instagram Age

By Postcard Cabins -

Our summer marketing intern, Lucy Dong, writes about being a college student in an age where ‘self-care’ is trending and how that conflicts with the 24/7 demands of our digital age.

Being a college student has certain perks: your best friends live next door, you engage in fascinating research, join dance clubs, and develop your passions.

And while often regarded as the four most exciting years of many people’s lives, college is also associated with a lot of stress, unhealthy habits, and a lack of balance between work and leisure.

According to a study by the American Psychological Association, millennials report the worst sleeping habits of all adults and are more likely to report consequences of those unhealthy sleeping habits. 

In my first days at Getaway, I was struck by the difference between my life at school and my life working full-time. Because this company places such an emphasis on healthy work-life balance, I can dedicate myself fully to the workday and not worry about answering emails after I leave the office.

But at school there are no out-of-office messages, no “working from home”; you live where you work, and vice-versa. It’s not uncommon to find people getting a few hours of a shut-eye on a library couch while finishing a big project. I’ve written entire papers from my bed. Weekends are as much for catching up on assignments as they are for blowing off steam.

This blurred line of separation between work and leisure and its detrimental effects have not gone unnoticed. And it’s not uncommon for recently graduated students to find that the transition into working life is not so drastic. Nights spent in the library are swapped for nights in the office, and writing papers from the dorm room are swapped for answering emails from the apartment. It’s no wonder that many of today’s workers practice the same behaviors they learned as sleep-deprived students and experience the same 24/7 anxiety.

On campus, discussions of how to improve student health are increasingly ubiquitous, but visible forms of self-care are largely performative. For all the times I’ve seen my classmates discuss self-care—in the guest column of the school newspaper, on their Instagrams, and elsewhere—I rarely see what is being preached, practiced consistently. The problem on college campuses is that self-care is only popular as discourse or worse, as a hashtag – not as action. 

The problem on college campuses is that self-care is only popular as discourse or worse, as a hashtag – not as action.

How did ‘self-care’ become so surface level? We hold ourselves and each other to impossible standards: we must hold multiple leadership positions, volunteer, do research, take full course loads, recruit for internships, but also party and work out regularly. At some point it becomes unrealistic to maintain anything more than an image of perfect health, achievement, and #selfcare. 

Students have the opportunity and responsibility to build a counterculture to modern anxiety and burnout in the workplace by confronting parallel issues on campus. Something this big can start at even the individual level: dedicating to just one or two extracurriculars, going to the academic advising center to improve time-management, and even considering work-life balance ratings as part of the job search. 

In the Getaway office

When everyone around you is going at warp speed, slowing down can feel like being left behind. But if students can try to dedicate themselves to embracing self-care for themselves (and not just for social media), campus culture can eventually reflect that. 

Work culture can also reflect that. My time with Getaway has already proven that not only can balance exist in the workplace, but also that both businesses and their workers benefit from a real culture of balance – not just the rhetoric surrounding it. And that’s a lesson I will carry with me to all future work environments, on campus and off.

 

Stressed out from your studies? Check out our new Student Program. 

For Your Free Time

Tips to Help You Try Forest Bathing

By Postcard Cabins -

If you haven’t yet heard of forest bathing, here’s a quick rundown. The whole point of forest bathing, which comes from the Japanese term, “shinrin-yoku,” which literally translates to “forest bath,” is to slow down. You’re meant to enter nature and simply experience it with each of your senses—to bathe your senses in nature.

Forest bathing emerged in Japan in the 1980s, but the ideas that inspired the basics of forest bathing, come from things that artists and writers, spiritual teachers, and health professionals have discussed throughout history. We are connected to nature, and returning to natural environments—even for short periods of time—helps us get out of the anxiety of our minds and into the wisdom of our bodies.

In our over-stimulating and overwhelming world—with screens, noise, and busy work cultures—forest bathing is the exact opposite. This time is meant for you to focus on, and reconnect to your breath, nature, and the present moment.

While you can also join a guided forest bathing session, here are some tips to try forest bathing on your own.

Pacific Northwest Hiking

Don’t Make a Plan

When you think of entering the woods where trails are already carved out, you probably think of your favorite hiking trail or running loop. When you’re forest bathing, however, you’re not meant to move that far through the woods. Instead of planning on following a specific trail that you already know, expect only to spend time in nature. Once you’re out in the middle of your forest bathing practice, the only thing you should follow is whatever your body feels like doing. If you want to sit, you can sit. If you want to take a few steps forward to investigate a new area along the trail, you can do so. As long as you go slowly, and you try to observe everything you’re seeing, hearing, touching, and feeling, you’re forest bathing.

Additionally, it’s best if you don’t bring your phone with you, or if you do, to completely turn your phone off to help you resist the temptation to check it throughout your forest bathing practice. If you’re in a place that’s unfamiliar to you, you can complete your forest bathing by just wandering and exploring wherever feels right, and then if you get lost you can turn your phone back on once you’ve finished your session to find your way back to the trailheads.

Deep Breaths and Deep Observation

As Henry David Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” The goal of forest bathing is to deliberately focus on each moment—each step and each breath you take, each tree you pass, each leaf, each animal, and each insect you com across. This intense focus on the environment around you can bring you a great sense of calm by pulling your mind away from your worries and to-do lists.

While you may feel a bit silly when you first start, imagine the way a child would step into that environment; they would count the points on the leaves they found, stick their hands in a creek or river, and even leave the trail to investigate fallen tree trunks and moss on rocks. To that childlike curiosity, forest bathing brings the wisdom of slowness—to deliberately give your curiosity more time to expand and ask questions about what you’re observing.

spend time in nature

Focus On An Intention

If you’re having trouble focusing on your environment, or you want to bring something new into your practice, you can decide to focus your practice on an intention. For example, you could focus on gratitude while you’re forest bathing. You could find the things you love about the environment you’re in—like the light through the trees, the sound of the ground beneath your shoes—and focus on feelings of gratitude that arise because you get to see, hear and feel these things.

Stay as Long as You Can

The more you practice forest bathing, the more comfortable you’ll get with lengthier sessions. And the longer you’re out there though, the more you’ll notice benefits from your practice. By the end of your forest bath, you’re likely to feel calm, joyful, and more present and rested.

Ready to take a walk in nature? Book your escape here.

For Your Free Time

Getaway for your Everyday

By Postcard Cabins -

Here at Getaway, we believe in the importance of building balance into our daily lives. To disconnect from the technological world and reconnect with the natural world, not just when you visit our cabins, but in your every day. 

Creating this balance not only provides you with quiet, unstructured time to recharge; it allows you to better focus when you are engaged with work, technology, and the hustle and bustle of city living.

To get you in that balanced mindset, we have some tips to bring the healthy benefits of Getaway back into your everyday life.

Put your phone on Do Not Disturb

Work is stressful; but when the day is done, allow yourself some time to recharge. Start building a strong work-life balance by putting your phone on Do Not Disturb mode when you leave the office. This lets you destress and allows your mind to wander away from those projects and assignments, so you can focus on the other important parts of your life – like your loved ones or your favorite hobbies.

Take a break and get some fresh air

Intention setting at Getaway

Schedule time into your workday to step outside. Nature is an important part of our lives and taking a constructive break will help you refocus once you return to work. Take a walk through a nearby park or take 15 minutes to just sit outside in the fresh air. Let the outdoors re-energize you before you take on the rest of the work day.

Introduce hands-on and analog activities into your free time

Experience Gift

Every Getaway cabin comes equipped with a booklet of conversation starters and fun activities. Whether you want to start a fulfilling conversation with your partner or engage your brain in a puzzle, we love finding joy in those analog moments. While our cabins create our favorite scene for this, there’s a lot you can do right at home. Ask your partner or friends a thought provoking question, meditate for a few minutes (or more), do a puzzle. Sometimes the best activity is letting yourself do nothing.

Artist Fellowship

Artists Line Johnsen & Andreas Bjørn Hansen

By Postcard Cabins -

Line Johnsen is an Art Director at Joan Creative and Andreas Bjørn Hansen is designer and animator at Buck Design, and together they created this illustration during their stay at one of our cabins:

The Brooklyn-based couple moved to NYC over three years ago from Copenhagen, and we chatted with them about how they maintain balance in their busy lives.

What occupies most of your time during the day?
Line: As an art director I spend most of my day ideating and coming up with visual concepts for brands.
Andreas: I spend most of my time, designing or animating for all kinds of brands.

What occupies most of your time during the weekend?

The weekends are no work zones.

Some weekends we are better at it than others, but we try to focus our free time on resetting our brains and do things that gets us inspired. We live right in between Prospect Park and the Brooklyn waterfront, so we always try to go to one or the other. Each month we plan to get out of the city and our favorite place to go is Upstate New York. In the summertime we go camping and in the wintertime we either go skiing or find a nice and cozy cabin.

What do you wish you had more time to do?
We wish there were more three day weekends that existed. Then we could go a little farther away and get to see even more places.

What is your favorite non-digital activity?
Hiking is our favorite. The combination of physical activity, fresh air and nature is always super exciting and shakes off any stress and negativity.

We both get inspired when we travel to new places, especially nature places. It’s almost an instant boost of creativity that hits us.

Ideas start flowing and we always come home with new ideas on things we want to make.

What’s your best tip for getting away?
Block out weekends ahead of time in your calendar. Even though you haven’t booked or rented anything yet, just make room for it to happen. It will remind you that it’s time to get out there.


You can follow along on their adventures at @linejohnsen and @andreashansen.

Artist Fellowship | Features

Singer Songwriter Frank Bell’s “Home”

By Postcard Cabins -

 “Let’s take a breath of fresh air; forget that we care / And look around…”

In Frank Bell’s new  music video for “Home”, it’s raining. He’s holding up an open umbrella to the side – as if to shelter an unseen loved one, or perhaps just anyone who may need it.

According to Frank, his song “Home” was conceived out of necessity. “What sets it apart from the other love songs is that it’s a love song for everyone. A reminder that we’re not alone, that we’re all in this crazy beautiful world together.”

A classically-trained cellist who morphed into a singer-songwriter, Frank Bell has always been a musician: “I was born, music found me, and we’ve been in love ever since.” However, he describes his story as “ever evolving”. In fact, Frank only recently recorded an updated version of “Home” to reflect more of his current musical interests.

Later in the video, Frank is holding the umbrella on a busy New York sidewalk. Most people pass him by, but occasionally he gets a thumbs-up and one couple even shares a sweet kiss under his protection. His song serves as a gentle reminder to everyone rushing through the motions of daily life to “soak up this moment and savor the time.”

It’s a reminder that we’re not alone, that we’re all in this crazy beautiful world together.

In our increasingly connected world, it’s become easier for talented artists like Frank to reach wider audiences. He first gained international recognition by posting his songs on YouTube and has since travelled the world and earned many accolades.

But as illustrated by his motivation for “Home”, Frank is more interested in turning his focus inward, “stripping down his sound and rediscovering the foundation of his passion: connecting with people through song.”

Such mindfulness is reflected in Frank’s music, which can be useful to everyone living with the 24/7 demands of our modern age…even artists, who play integral roles in bringing balance to the lives of others.

Frank says that creating balance can be as easy as remembering to “breathe.” But he also recognizes that it requires intention and effort: “Practice…This is something that I’m constantly working on. Remembering and being mindful of why I do what I do, and why music choose me in the first place is very helpful. I try not to take for granted that I’m able to create music and share it with others.”

You can find a recent live recording of “Home” here and a 360° look at Frank’s time making music in one of our NY cabins here. You can even find your own temporary “home” with us.

Features | Partnerships

Getaway’s WYLD Experience: On Setting Intentions

By Postcard Cabins -

To close out the year, Getaway’s marketing team carved out some time to work with WYLD Leadership to learn more about setting intentions. WYLD crafts incredible learning and development experiences – in person or virtually – customized to a team’s needs and goals, meaning no workshop is the same. WYLD’s mission is to draw out the unique greatness in people. They pull from a palette of psychology, nature, creativity, mindfulness, neuroscience, and ancient wisdom to curate a safe and fun experiential learning environment that feels transformative and sustainable.

2021 was a big year full of changes for our team, so entering our first intention-setting session with WYLD, we were feeling a bit scattered and many of us admitted to feeling that they were having a hard time setting aside our to-dos to make time for reflection and intention setting for the new year. To help us get a bit more grounded and prepare us to switch gears, our WYLD Guide, Sam, led us through a guided meditation to let go of any stress we were carrying into the session, and to reflect on what the word intention brings to mind. We discussed the difference between goals and intentions. Ultimately, reaching the conclusion that intentions were looser than goals, and intentions allow us to decide how we want to be in the world amidst the projects and goals we’re working toward. Intentions clarify our actions by acting as a north star for us to keep in mind, so we can make choices aligned in that direction. On the flip side, goals require a set of specific actions or tasks, and while a goal can be achieved, an intention has no end date or set of criteria to accomplish. 

We decided on some team intentions for 2022, which include embracing a mindset of possibility, finding the joy in what we get to do every day, and honoring our personal and collective truths as we share Getaway’s story. And then we outlined practices in our working lives that we want to start doing, stop doing, and continue doing. For example, one practice we’d like to continue in 2022, is to send a message to our team Slack channel to let everyone know we’ll be taking a break, going for a walk, or just grabbing lunch or coffee. 

In our next exercise with WYLD, we took some time to get creative and reflect on our personal and professional intentions to create a vision board of what those intentions mean to us. This was to keep our intentions fresh in our minds, but also to take advantage of the benefits of creativity. Carving out time and space for creative thinking and creative projects can positively influence well-being and can help to promote innovation and problem-solving in the workplace, so after our WYLD session where we got our creative juices flowing, we were ready to take a new stab at some of the week’s challenges.

Our Graphic Designer, Julianna said, “Having WYLD work with our team brought greater alignment and a consistent re-centering of the very human-ness that is key to our brand. Through the sessions, I felt more connected to my teammates and energized in my work.”

After our sessions with WYLD this past quarter, we’re entering 2022 with clarity and direction, both personally and professionally, and we’ve renewed our commitments to show up as fully as we can for ourselves and our co-workers. And after a year of workshops with WYLD, we feel connected as a team, aligned with ourselves, and ready for whatever 2022 brings.

Interested in connecting with a WYLD guide and exploring your strengths more? Email them at [email protected] to get your session scheduled and they will match you with a coach that fits your professional and personal goals. Mention promo code WYLD20 for 20% off (this includes a CliftonStrengths code to take the behavioral assessment). A coaching session with a WYLD guide will be tailored to your self development needs, whatever you lead… a business, a family, a team, or your own self through the day, gift yourself the time and space to reflect and grow.

In need of some free time in nature to reflect and reconnect to what matters most? Book your Getaway today.

For Your Free Time

Wellness Tip: Go on a Hike

By Postcard Cabins -

The Appalachian Trail begins at Springer Mountain in Georgia, then moves north, crossing 14 states, eight national forests, and six national parks before ending at the peak of Mount Katahdin in Maine. By the time backpackers (known as “thru-hikers”) arrive at Mount Katahdin, they’ve spent at least five straight months trekking along the 2,178-mile trail, the longest marked path in the United States.

The trail got its start a hundred years ago, in 1921, when a Massachusetts forester and conservationist named Benton MacKaye published an article laying out his idea for a walking path across the Appalachian Mountains. He believed that the stress and speed of urban life were bad for people’s health, so he envisioned the trail as a destination for worn-out city dwellers in need of recreation and refreshment in nature. When journalists asked what the trail’s purpose was, MacKaye’s reply was Zen-like in its simplicity: “To walk, to see, and to see what you see.”

In the century since, the pace of city life has only sped up, and we’re spending less and less time outside. MacKaye’s concern for our health, and his proposed solution of getting out into nature for a reset, are as relevant as ever.

While there are plenty of health benefits to hiking, hiking is also a great way to bond with friends and family, there’s a low barrier to entry, and it’s inexpensive. Here are some tips to help you plan and enjoy your next hike from our founder, Jon Staff. For more tips, check out his book “Getting Away: 75 Everyday Practices for Finding Balance in Our Always-On World.”

1. Locate a Nearby Trail 

You don’t need to live in the middle of the wilderness to find good places to hike. Many cities and towns have parks and other greenspaces with walking paths, and you can find good hiking trails just an hour away from many major cities.

2. Warm Up

One of the most common hiking injuries is a sprained ankle, but you can reduce your risk with exercises to expand your range of motion and build core strength, which will help to stabilize you on an uneven trail. Crunches, squats, and lunges will strengthen your core, while a resistance band can help to improve strength and extension.

3. Break in New Footwear in Advance 

Blisters are a buzzkill. If you plan to wear new or rarely used shoes or boots on your hike, spend some time walking around in them in advance. While lightweight hiking shoes might feel comfortable right away, heavier leather boots may take up to a few weeks to soften to the shape of your feet. 

4. Stay Safe 

Check the weather a few hours before you plan to set out. Even if you plan to hike for only a few hours, bring a backpack with water, sunscreen, bug spray, snacks, extra layers, and a basic first aid kit. It’s safer to hike with a partner, but if you’re planning to go out alone, make sure to tell someone where you’re going and when you expect to be back. 

5. Budget Extra Time

Hiking is usually slower than walking, since rugged terrain and changes in elevation will slow your pace. Depending on the landscape and your level of fitness, assume you’ll cover one to two miles of trail per hour. Add an extra hour for every 1,000 feet of elevation gain. If you’re new to hiking, start with a shorter, easier trail, and err on the safe side by budgeting in a few extra hours.

Useful Websites for Hikers:

Ready to plan your next escape to nature? Book your Getaway today.