The best summer weekend might be the one with nothing planned

There is a weekend coming up with nothing on the calendar.

Not this one. Father's Day weekend is spoken for. And next weekend somebody's got a graduation party, and then suddenly it's the Fourth of July and that whole week is accounted for. But look a little further out. There it is. A Saturday and a Sunday with nothing written down, no commitments, no place you are supposed to be.

Most people I know would find a way to fill it before it arrived.

We do this every summer. We feel the pressure to make it the best summer ever, so we plan. We book the Shore house in February. We lock in the weekend at the shore with the cousins. We get the concert tickets, the restaurant reservations, the day trips mapped out on the phone. Summer in New Jersey is 105 days, give or take, and we treat it like a project with deliverables.

I understand the impulse. The summers go. You blink and the kids are older and the one summer you meant to do the thing, you didn't do the thing.

The weight of the unplanned weekend

But here is what I have started to notice. By the time a heavily planned summer weekend arrives, I am already tired. I spent the week commuting, hitting deadlines, navigating everything the school year throws at a family — and now I have to perform summer. I have to be the version of myself who is fun and present and making memories.

Sometimes I pull it off. Sometimes I just wish I was sitting in the backyard.

I felt guilty about that for a long time. An unplanned weekend felt lazy. It felt like a failure of imagination, or worse, a waste. Summer is finite. You are supposed to use it.

Then came the years when COVID made the decision for us. No plans was the only option. No options meant no pressure. And some of those weekends turned out to be the ones I remember most clearly — not because something extraordinary happened, but because something small did. A fire in the backyard on a Friday night with the neighbors who walked over. A Saturday morning drive with no destination that ended up at a farm stand we had never stopped at before. A Sunday where the whole day moved at the pace of whatever felt right at the time.

Nobody planned any of it. It just happened because the calendar was empty.

SEE ALSO: The quieter side of the Jersey Shore — no boardwalk, all beach 

surf fishing is fun on a "no plans weekend" | photo by EJ

Having no plans is a plan

The weekend after Father's Day, or the one after the Fourth — that quiet stretch when the big summer obligations have passed and the next round hasn't started yet — that is the window. Leave it alone. Don't fill it.

See what a last-minute text to the neighbors produces. Drive toward the Shore without a reservation and find out what's available. Take the long way somewhere. Sit on the porch until the idea comes to you, instead of having scheduled the idea three weeks in advance.

You might find something in your own town you have driven past a hundred times without stopping. New Jersey is full of those places — the farm stand, the creek trail, the diner you keep meaning to try. They are there every weekend. You just need a Saturday with nothing else on the books.

I am not saying abandon summer. I am saying leave a little of it unscheduled and see what shows up.

The unplanned weekend is not lazy. It is its own kind of plan. And you will go into Monday more rested than you have been all summer.