10 Differences Between a Vacation Home and a Work-Away-From-Home Rental

Our living room for the month. It's snug, but clean and comfortable. 

We've arrived in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. "Why Pittsburgh?" was the most often-asked question while planning my trip. For us, it hit a few criteria: 

• Close enough to DC that we can still abort this whole plan if Month 1 doesn't go well
• A big enough city that we don't need a car while we're here
• But cheap enough that we could rent a month-long AirBnB that didn't cost more than our mortgage (math: even a $100/night Airbnb is $3100/mo. No thanks)
• It's a city we've always wanted to visit but haven't gotten to yet 
• Guaranteed WiFi for remote work
• It has a reputation as being pretty chill, which sounds great right about now
• Easy access to hospitals just in case 
• Not a coronavirus hot spot (oops, Allegheny county spiked a week before our visit)

So, the criteria were a little different, because we're not on vacation and because we're in the middle of a pandemic. I'll do a "month in review" in September and revisit whether we enjoyed our stay, but I'm quickly realizing there's a handy list of things to have if you plan to live/work in a vacation rental, versus if you're sightseeing and off the clock.

Things to lock down if you are planning an extended work-cation for two:

🅇 Ask if the home gets a steady, consistent internet signal. Here's a key difference between working from home and being a digital nomad (or vacationer). Travel vloggers can do all of their recording and editing offline, in remote locations if needed. Vacationers just need to check a few emails and upload their photos to the cloud. When you have two adults video conferencing Monday through Friday, you need to ask your rental host whether they have steady high speed internet (10mbps--tech heads might scoff, I promise that's enough for two people to Zoom, Slack, watch Netflix, etc).

🅇Make sure there is a dedicated work space for each person. We did not plan for this need, but we got lucky: our first rental has a desk that we put in the bedroom, and a dining table that works well as another workstation. If you're working, you're going to want to make sure your home has two separate rooms, with real doors, so two people can talk on the phone at the same time without hearing each other. Note: this is one big reason hotel stays aren't going to work for us during this trip.

🅇Stock the fridge and don't forget snacks. Keep meal planning simple, since you won't have access to your pantry. But in terms of volume, buy like you're eating at home, not on vacation. For a one month stay, we stuffed the fridge full of our favorite easy-to-prep meals: 

• Frozen dumplings 
• Frozen fish balls for simple vegetable soup
• A whole chicken
• A couple of steaks 
• Ground pork (if you're Chinese, you can already think of seven ways to use ground pork)
• Tofu (see above comment re: ground pork)
• A mix of leafy green vegetables and storage-friendluy cabbages and carrots/onions
• Breakfast items: yogurt, milk, coffee, juice, oatmeal
• Assorted fruit
• Kimchi, kimchi, and some more kimchi

But, alas, I forgot SNACKS. I don't pack snacks on vacation, because it's so easy to buy interesting snacks wherever you go. But alas, coronavirus + working from home means snacks aren't just crossing my path. I'll have to go get some snacks this weekend.

🅇 Bring your own pillow, sheets, and blanket. I have never travelled with my own bedding before, and only considered it because of COVID-19 concerns. But now that I'm on the road, I'm really glad I did it and would consider it again for a long-term stay, pandemic or no. Bringing a piece of home with me (quite literally) helps our apartment feel more like home, which I think in term helps ground me in my workweek instead of putting me in some kind of weird vacation-work limbo. And in that vein...

🅇 Bring the odd little things you use every day, even if you would never bring them on vacation. I normally pack extremely light--J and I have gone two weeks sharing one carry-on and a backpack each. But for this trip I packed our favorite travel mugs, a pair of warm fuzzy slippers, full-sized skincare products, extra headsets, a small foam roller, and a couple of light dumbbells. For any travel situation other than this one, all of that would be total overkill. But again: coronavirus! No gyms, no popping into whatever store I need, and no super easy way to guarantee Amazon delivery. A girl's gotta have a plan. 

One thing I didn't bring? An itinerary. Friends who've travelled with me have seen my planning spreadsheets: activity options for every day, contingency plans for weather and closures, food ideas for every night. Not this trip! We didn't even decide what city we'll go to next until we got to Pittsburgh. 

For now, I'm happy to have a place to call home and a few weeks to show yinz around this beautiful city.