Of course, people are staycationing (taking vacations at or close to home) because of the economy. And it’s hard to blame them, since every home town has some fun things to see and do. People are going to their local swimming pools (even backyard pools) and pretending to be on vacation. They take picnic baskets, even take their digital cameras and take lots of photographs as if they were in some exotic place.

Companies like Wal-Mart and Target are jumping on the trend, even a photo retouching company is running a sale on retouching snapshots from your staycation. Maybe they can crop out your neighbor’s car from the background in the pictures, along with slimming you.

Of course, more staycations means fewer guests for us. We just have to hang on until the economy improves and (we hope) pent-up demand will bring us cars full of happy vacationers.