One of the things about travel is that it literally lets us escape.
Travel can be a physical destination or a state of mind. Sometimes both.
Singer Jimmy Buffett knew both sides well. He passed away last week after a battle with cancer. He was able to straddle the line between reality and fantasy. And he knew how to make both work.
Buffett turned one of his hit songs into a reality with the Margaritaville concept. There are numerous Margaritaville resorts around the country, and there’s even a Margaritaville at Sea.
With all due respect to Tony Bennett and ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’, and Frank Sinatra and ‘New York, New York’, it is Jimmy Buffett’s rendition of Margaritaville that might be the best travel-related song.
At its core, Margaritaville is a song about assigning blame and fault. But mostly it’s about finding a place where you can escape. In many respects, travel is exactly like that. And the Margaritaville resorts allow you to do that.
If you can get to a place where your biggest worry is finding a lost shaker of salt, you accomplished your goal. Margaritaville is where escapism turns into reality. Margaritaville, the song, is about shedding your anxiety and worries.
So are the resorts.
It’s a mythic place come to life.
Here’s a good example. Professional athletes talk about ‘getting to’ the World Series or the Super Bowl. They make it sound like it’s a destination to achieve. In reality, in the case of the Super Bowl, the destination changes every year.
But that’s just the physical location.
Getting to the World Series or the Super Bowl brings a sense of accomplishment like you have reached the summit or the zen. It’s about how a place can make you feel and not so much the destination.
Like Margaritaville.
Problems can still exist, but they don’t seem so daunting.
That’s what the power of travel can do.
