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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.

Features

Teaching Balance in the Modern Age

By Postcard Cabins -

Teaching is considered by some to be a thankless profession: though the hours seem short compared to other jobs, the reality is that it’s a tough gig to balance work and life with all the prep work: answering emails, updating the classroom website, entering data, lesson planning, preparing for meetings, and more.

Recently, one of our guests, Liz Orlando, an elementary school teacher and yoga instructor who lives just outside Boston, MA, wrote to us recounting her reflections on her trip. She told us about how teachers often feel the need “to disconnect from the world from time to time.”

Which makes sense as teaching in the digital age is tricky; technology has dominated our lives and now is an integral part of the classroom. There are technology specialists now – gone are the days of card catalogs –  and “it is remarkable how technology savvy a seven year old can be… it can be really difficult to capture students’ attention when you are competing with technology,” according to Liz.

Here are Liz’s top three lessons to teach kids about balance:

Slow down to speed up. By slowing down, you can do things once and do them correctly. By going too fast, we can make mistakes and then have to re-do work, which ultimately slows us down. We said that in our classroom all the time this year. So much so that a student brought in pencils with that phrase on them!

Slow down to speed up

Make decisions for what is best for you. With so much stimulation everywhere, it can be tough to prioritize what works for you. I’ve also been practicing saying “no,” meaning if it isn’t going to serve me, I let it pass. However, I’m also being mindful of saying “yes” when I think it might be a good opportunity for me to grow and try something new.

To have good friends, you must be a good friend. Practice kindness.  There are so many digital friends one can have, and technology allows us to connect in so many ways, but there is something about being in front of the people you love.  Carve out the time to really relish those moments, and set plans to do it again then and there.

Find balance in your own life

As the saying goes, it’s never too late to learn. After all, you don’t need to be a student to take a page out of Miss Orlando’s lesson plan and start learning about how to create balance in your own life. If you’re looking to slow down, prioritize yourself, and be a good friend, we know the perfect place to start.

Artist Fellowship | Features

Getaway Artist Fellow Profile: Forage Paper Co.’s Christina Chun

By Postcard Cabins -

Meet Christina Chun. Christina is a talented illustrator-turned-entrepreneur, running her very own stationery business called Forage Paper Co.

Christina is also one of our recent Artist Fellows in New York. You may have caught some of her work if you purchased our Black Friday deal; she designed beautiful postcards below inspired by her Getaway stay. We loved the postcards so much, we printed them up and sent them along to our guests who booked on Black Friday. Take a look at the design below.

We sat down with Christina to talk about her stationery work, what inspires her, and how she gets away.

Let’s start off by introducing yourself.
Hello! My name is Christina Chun. I currently live and work in New York City with my husband and my studio-mate German Shepherd. After graduating from college with a degree in illustration, I worked as a freelance illustrator for many years until Forage Paper Co. came into the picture.

How did you start Forage Paper Co.?
Several years ago, I started creating my own stationery and sharing them with everyone–friends, family, my local community, and the internet. To my pleasant surprise, people began purchasing them and retailers started carrying my cards in their shops! It was then when I realized that merging my love for illustrations and my passion for stationery was the perfect marriage. After mustering up enough courage, I started my very own business: Forage Paper Co. officially opened in 2015 in Oakland, California.

Where do you go for inspiration?
I forage for inspiration and ideas wherever I go. It can be as grand as my travels around the globe or quotidian as a walk through Central Park with my dog. From there, it all gets recorded in my sketchbook, and then I take it to the literal drawing board.

Forage Paper

How do you recharge?
I recharge by either reading, cooking new recipes, exploring a new part of the city, or spending time with friends.

Where do you go to get away?
Living in New York City, Central Park is my get-away. Thankfully, I live close by and can enjoy it whenever I please.

What sound do you find most relaxing?
There’s nothing like the sound of a heavy downpour with a chorus of thunder. It can put me right to sleep!

Let’s talk analog in a digital world. What does making stationery mean to you in 2018?
Nowadays, everything we do is quick and on-the-go. We microwave our food; we send emails from our phones; we snap, click, and go. In this hyper digitized climate, nothing beats receiving a handwritten letter in the mail. Why? Because it’s saturated with purpose and thoughtfulness.

When I see someone smiling as they pick up my products, I know they intend to share a slice of that joy with pen on paper. Seeing it truly affirms my belief that people desire to be connected to others. There is nothing more poignant and meaningful than a handwritten note. Knowing that my stationery can be the sweet medium makes me happy.

What’s your dream illustration and/or stationery project?
The beauty of my job is that I get to illustrate my dreams anytime I want–and I have. I pour myself into my illustrations, and I think others get a glimpse of it in my work. In terms of projects, I am always cooking up ideas in my studio. I recently launched a series of notepads, and I have plans to expand my line even more!

Finish the sentence. At Getaway…
I took my time cooking over white-hot embers, slept without an alarm, woke up to the best view of fall foliage, and read to my heart’s content.

Forage Paper Co. can be found online, Etsy, locally, and on Instagram and Facebook at @foragepaperco.

Photo by Lindsey Swedick from Forage Paper Co.

Artist Fellowship

Meet an Artist Fellow: Musician, Nakaya

By Postcard Cabins -

Fill us in on your background—personally and in your creative practice.

I am originally from Los Angeles, but I’ve been New York based for nearly 8 years now. I come from a pretty unique background – my father was a hip-hop producer in the 90s and I attended a radically liberal (and what some might call “hippie”) school that focused deeply on thoughtful learning and I think those influences (as well as a multitude of others) have informed who I am as a person and as an artist. I want to bring different perspectives to indie music – time and time again we are presented with the same identity tropes in alternative spaces, and I want to be honest about my experiences to hopefully find connection with people who have felt different or *weird* like me. 

How does your connection to nature influence you personally, and how does it influence your art?

Nature is where I base all of my work. We are of the earth and it recharges and inspires me to bask in the joy that nature gives to us. It’s magical and I feel like there is no way to describe the feeling of forest bathing that does it justice, but I really believe it’s because we are innately connected to the universe. 

How was your Getaway? Did your time in your cabin influence your process or inspire any new ideas?

My getaway was amazing. I felt so safe and comforted by the space provided, I am mad at myself for not having booked this time sooner. I haven’t taken my acoustic guitar on a trip upstate in a very long time and as soon as I pulled it out of the case, it just felt like “I’m back.” Like it was home and it was natural. The quiet in comparison to the constant buzz of the city just gave me much-needed clarity to work through some new ideas. 

I had such an amazing time at Getaway, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is, particularly with the obstacles we’ve been facing recently, to take a break. Recharge and be gentle with yourself so later on, you have power and energy to show up for yourself and your loved ones when they most need you. <3 

You can find me on instagram HERE and on my website HERE. 🙂 

Need your own creative escape? Book your Getaway today.

Features | Reflections

Benefits of Analog Photography

By Postcard Cabins -

I was at a wedding recently where there were not only four professional photographers, but one overeager mother who, I swear, took 10,000 photographs. The device that turned us all into walking encyclopedias also turned us into walking paparazzi.

But if I were to go out on a limb, I bet that you would agree with me that the explosion in the quantity of photography has not been matched with the same increase in quality.

The device that turned us all into walking encyclopedias also turned us into walking paparazzi.

All of this has me thinking about my new year’s resolution, which was to get a hobby (any hobby!). Inspired by this wedding, I’m thinking I’ll take up analog photography. What’s to lose? Here’s the case in favor:

LEARN A NEW SKILL

Analog photography is an art—you can learn to adjust the focus, aperture and other factors, which gives you more control over the photo. It also forces you to pause and think about what you’re photographing, allowing you to savor the act of creating a memory.

MORE DIGITAL SPACE

Digital photos have turned into digital junk, taking up tons of storage space in form of thirty variations of posing with your best friend or ten iterations of your last brunch. Maybe they become one of the 1.8 billion images uploaded to the internet every day, or maybe they’ll languish forgotten in the archives. Analog photography can lighten that digital load!

DELAYED GRATIFICATION

There’s something magical about waiting for the film to develop into tangible memories you can hold in your hands.

With film, you can’t immediately look at the photo snapped, but is that so bad? There’s something magical about waiting for the film to develop into tangible memories you can hold in your hands, or laugh about how bad a particular shot came out.

If enough of us switch to analog, perhaps we can counterbalance ‘a society too busy filming childhood to enjoy it’ or correct for the loss of memory in details of something photographed instead of observed, also known as the ‘photo-taking-impairment-effect’.

To join us, you can enter to win an analog camera from our friends at Lomography and a night on us here.

If the photos turn out terribly, I’ll revert to my other favorite pastime: taking no photos at all.