LONDON ? What is it about foreign vacations that they can leave you more stressed than if you had just stayed at home?

Imagine: packing entire wardrobes and a medicine cabinet into a regulation-size luggage; canceling paper and milk deliveries; paying off household bills; notifying the postman and next-door neighbors; booking a housesitter and placing dog in kennels; navigating crowded airports, endless security checks; enduring lengthy delays; making sense of exchange rates; quelling a fear of flying and mid-air terrorist attacks.

If vacations are to be successful ? and memorable ? they require organization and planning with military precision.

Straitened times

These days, tourist arrivals in favorite hotspots are severely down. Travel companies report a collapse in bookings and airlines are grounding their planes. Hotels are offering, at knockdown prices, all manner of extras ? pillow menus, rose-petal baths, hot stone massages ? to fill empty rooms.

If you still have the readies in these straitened times, there has never been a better time to see the world ? the waterfalls of Machu Picchu, palaces of Jaipur, the Rif mountains of Morocco, the olive groves of Tuscany, the magnificent ruins of ancient civilizations.

Go! Get away!

I don?t, however, mean cramming eight European countries in five days, or taking in the sights from the back of a bus with snoring fellow tourists too tired and bewildered to tell where they are at any given time.

This isn?t travel; this is conveyor-belt tourism that earns you only bragging rights with ignorant people back home.

What does it mean ? to travel? The philosopher Lao Tzu said a good traveler has no fixed plans and was not intent on arriving. It is to leave the everyday behind, for leaving?s sake, to become a curious and cheerful refugee from the weary sighs, slights, hurts and disappointments of the modern world.

To bask under an alien and faraway sun that would soften life?s edges; to populate your little world with complete strangers who may become friends, or with whom to break bread.

A vacation from one?s self, it is to engage with the new or the old in exotic horizons and distant seas ? tea with the Touaregs under Saharan skies; the sights and smells of the Maghreb; the cuisine of France where everyone has an opinion on food; the romance of the Silk Road; the music of Wagner in Bayreuth; the ubiquitous art of Italy; sailing and clam bakes in Cape Cod.

When everything we see, hear or feel is only for a time, it is apt to stop and stare, that you may forget time and bank memories.

To travel is to still your careworn, buffeted longings, in a boundless universe full of numinous wonder, rousing your capacity to be astonished.

Surprise, serendipity

We want to be amazed; we want to be calmed. Slow days gliding into each other; the heart opening up like a daisy in the heat of the Mediterranean sun. Stupor from a good long lunch, losing entire afternoons in slumber; the evenings a promise of moonlight sonatas, the sonorous sound of night trains trundling past, the call to prayer by the muezzin from the minarets.

Sometimes we don?t know what we?re searching for until we find it. Travel is like that ??looking upon something as an outsider, contemplating our condition from a great height or distance, taking roads less traveled.

So we escape, to dream and explore, so that we can discover anew that which we see every day.

Before you go, study your destination well, but allow for serendipity and surprise. Tamp down fevered expectations because the reality may well disappoint.

While they are a balm to frazzled souls, vacations aren?t the cure to our problems. We can?t pack several lifetimes into one vacation ? so we go to one place at a time, slowly. While away the idle hours, not caring hither and thither, or cramming centuries of sights into a couple of hours.

Genuine sophisticates want less, not more; quality, not quantity.

Whether it?s a voyage of discovery, romance or thrills, a shopping or cultural expedition, a gourmet or activity weekend, or a few days? sheer indulgence; whether alone or in company; on foot, by plane, car or train, remember that, as Alain de Botton said: ?At the heart of travel is a perceptual shift; it doesn?t depend on going to an exotic or faraway place. It goes to the heart of happiness, and the only way to be happy is to realize how much depends on how you look at things.?

Anxieties

With all its existential anxieties, sometimes you have to leave your life behind, so that you may appreciate it more.

The chill of winter has given way to April showers, bringing us closer to the sinuous choreography of summer holidays, which we dance to with glee and anticipation.

Maybe Cap Ferrat again this year? Brissago in the Ticino? A waterfront cottage in Dorset? Zanzibar? Muscat? The mountains of the Ifugao? My home and garden?

?Yves preferred to travel in his imagination,? said Saint Laurent?s decorator Jacques Grange. ?Real places disappointed him. Without leaving his apartment, he could voyage to the Mont Sainte-Victoire of Cezanne or the Spain of Goya.?

Quite so. Travel, after all, is a state of mind; an inner experience that, if you let it, steals you away from here and now, washing away the motes and dust of everyday life.