I've had the most success with getting suntanned Sims if I stop their sunbathing right around the two-hour mark. It seems that, if they sunbathe for less time than that, they won't get any result, and if they sunbathe longer than that, they get sunburns.

Babysitting a sunbather is a hassle like that, so I usually don't bother with it. I'm not sure if there are any benefits (Social or otherwise) to getting a tan, but I think the last Sim I did that with was Stella Terrano. Have you ever seen an alien hybrid with a tan? Their skin turns this darker, waxy shade of green, like a shiny avocado. It's funny in a way.


Aw. I like the gestures, especially Bow. They're good for some fast and easy Social and relationship points, and it's fun to teach a gesture to another Sim by doing it with them five or six times in a row. "Okay, here's how you Chest Pound: AGAGAGAGAGAH, HOOGAH! Now you try." "Okay...awawawawawa, hoo!" "That was terrible. Here: AGAGAGAGAGAH, HOOGAH!" "...wagagagagaga, huggah?" "Okay, we're getting there. Three more times and you should have it...." :D

As for dancing, I like fire dancing's fun and potential for earning tips, even if I don't get to challenge my Sims to fiery dance duels nearly as often as I'd like. Slap dancing's great (and, like smustling, you can do it even if the radio's in some completely distant part of the lot), but hula dancing sort of grates against my usual music selections of Metal and Techno. It's hard to gracefully shuffle your feet, gyrate your hips and snake your hands around when Man's Fire is growling and screaming at you from the next room, you know?

I don't think I have the patience to play any family 7 days in a row unless I fast-forwarded half of the time, lol -- I get too impatient wanting to get on with the rest of the rotation cycle and finding out what'll happen in the rest of the hood. But 3-5 days depending on the size of the family, their budget, and how much drama they come with (read: how much vacation time they're going to waste taking turns catfighting each other). I mostly just let them run wild, only stepping in to stop themselves from fainting, peeing themselves or nearly starving to death. Sometimes they get to do BV-specific activities too, if they roll wants for it.

Graduation/reunion trips can be fun, though. Or joint singles-on-the-hunt-for-spouses vacations (who said all those tourists are good for nothing?). The latter can get very interesting especially with low ACR timers involved

Oh, you don't have to play the same family for seven Sim-days straight. If you have a family taking a weeklong vacation in Takemizu Village, and you suddenly get the urge to go back to Sim State U and push your favorite college student through his Sophomore year, you just go back to the Neighborhood, switch from Takemizu Village to Sim State University (in the same Neighborhood, of course) and there you go. And if you later decide to go back to your Sims in Takemizu Village, you just click the little airplane at the top of the screen, pick Takemizu Village and you'll be back to catching ninjas and learning the Dragon Legend in no time.

(Alternately, you can go back to the vacationing family's regular house, apartment or dorm, take note of the dull green doodad floating over it, click the place, get chewed out by the game for forgetting that your Sims are spending time in a foreign land and wait while the game corrects your mistake and spirits you to Takemizu Village. Either or. )

Fishing makes it much easier to manage vacationing Sims (or Sims anywhere at anytime, as long as there's a decent pond around). Just line them all up at the pond's edge, start casting their lines out, Ask any nearby townies to Join and you can go to the bathroom and make your own lunch meat sandwich from your own fridge while your Sims happily chat about UFOs and try to land that elusive Golden Trout for hours on end. Just be sure to look in on them now and then, just to make sure they're not wetting themselves or using the same old worms for bait after they've graduated to better Fishing badges. Freshly caught fishes and a grill nearby mean that your Sims get to eat for free, they're twice as good if you cook them up in a proper kitchen and, strangely enough, they make great gifts too. "I'm so glad that we met, Samantha. I love you. Here, have a dead jumbo catfish." "*gasps* Oh, George! You really do love me!" :D

One thing I recently discovered was that Sims who are on vacation at the same place can meet each other on community lots; so now I send multiple families at once and play a mini-rotation, letting them run into each other and visit. They still can't invite each other over, but I have a teleporter cat that fixes that! Vacations can run a lot longer that way.

If, you know, I'm not constantly having to run back and test Joe, restore from backup if he's glitched, and play it over...

Alas, poor Joe. The Matrix must be angry with him, always holding him back in that little computer world.... :D

There's something that I've never tried, though: if you have two families with vacation homes in the same vacation locale (say, Three Lakes), both vacation homes have phones and the families both decide to go on vacation at the same time, can they call each other up from their vacation homes and invite each other over? It would help stretch the vacations for both families a bit; one day, play the Smiths, invite the Joneses over and go fishing together. The next day, play the Joneses, invite the Smiths over and dig up half the mountainside so you can find Bigfoot together. And so on.

I might have to try that idea, too.

Nope, as I said, they can't invite each other over; but you can teleport them.

Haha, I know - I just happen to be really stubborn about seeing through an entire rotation with a family before I move onto the next one, or I'll just wind up playing favorites and leaving the rest hanging And since the neighborhood storyline technically doesn't advance forward while you're on vacation since you're a) not aging and b) unable to work, go to school or meet anybody who's not also on vacation with you, that just means an even longer rotation round for that specific family = less inclined to want to play it.

Ah, well. They can still bump into each other at the community lots too. I guess that's something.

I like to send my college students to Twikki Island during late winter or spring for a few days (because hey, Spring Break), and I've had several college students bump into each other on the South End Beach. It's amazing how popular that pirate ship is with college students. Captain Dregg runs a very nice tourist attraction, doesn't he?

(Of course, if the students don't have a lot of money because they're freshmen or their grades suck, they have to settle for having Spring Break in Three Lakes instead. Most of my SSU dorms have a ton of boot plaques hanging in their kitchens from all the students coming back from Three Lakes. )

Not entirely true, actually. I had to facepalm when Jane Dennis came all the way back from Twikkii Island to be part of the welcoming party for her new neighbour.

Depends on how you play! If you use mods to change the day of the week/season and the ages of the sims involved when they return from vacation then it's possible to play vacationing sims as part of a rotation. I do - 1 day = 1 day, no matter where my sims are. If they go on vacation I play one day of vacation as equivalent to one day in the main 'hood, and if they're at college they are students for 8 days (thanks to a mod) instead of 24 and I play 1 day of college as equivalent to one day for a non-student. That makes both vacations and college/university (in my game university is basically college but at a vacation destination instead of in the main 'hood. Yay for mods!) more interesting for me - I don't think I've ever been bored with them!

Depends on the sims who is vacationing, really. I usually send them on 7 days (but now I'm going to check out that vacation mode for extended days).

If they are a romance sims, I sometimes send them with their new conquest. 7 days gives them long enough time to be really great lovers by the end of their vacation. This helps so they are not caught by another lover and eliminates fighting with another lover. And then sometimes I send them on vacation to seek out a local for their new conquest. But usually they end up talking long enough to be friends so when my sims gets back home he can call and talk to them until their friendship is advanced enough for him to invite them over to stay a few days. Then they can build a love interest and usually woohoo a few times before the local has to return home.

If my sims owns a business say like ............ a deli or a sub shop, there is no kitchens in these types of businesses my sims own, only display cases. (Eliminates paying a cook and/or server if it were a restaurant type business.) My sims uses the first couple of days cooking and replacing stock in their inventory using fresh fruits and veggies from the garden. (This eliminates messages about their business suffering.)Then the rest of the time they just have fun and do the stuff they roll wants for. The same goes for my sims who owns the fish market, he goes where there are ponds and fish the first few days to rebuild his stock and the rest just fun stuff.

My family sims go on vacations only to fulfill their wants while they are there. If they stop rolling wants for that vacation spot, they go home early.

I sometimes try and fill in all the Vacation Memories but then I give up and use treeag's Book to do it!

I seldom use Vacation, and only a few hoods have ANY sub-hoods (Vacation, Uni, Downtown). When someone DOES go, it's only for a few days. And only do THAT for couples that need some "couples building"- like no bolts, or anger, or newlyweds.

I just had that happen too...again. Two of my werewolf college girls who are presently vacationing on Hoar Mountain showed up at Sue's Secret Kitchen last night. One of them even joined a cooking contest and a breakdance battle against my Chinese Far Eastern masseuse. :p

I don't think the people who coded BV considered the possibility of anybody playing vacation days in rotation, so they didn't add in anything that would keep them from appearing on community lots where their residential status allowed them to be. The fact that the house can't be opened while they're gone is presumably the result of them being anchored to it in some way. This is one reason why I've started playing vacations as mini-rotations, much like I do with University, sending a number at once so I can rotate among houses and get my variety (and get them together on community lots) but I'm not confronted by somebody getting caught cheating at Crypt-o-Night when they're supposed to be in Twikkii. Also, it's a convenient marker for back ups. Hit the end of a rotation, back up, send everybody on vacation, check that Joe's all right, if not restore and start over, if so back up again and move on to my University rotation.

Aw, but it's funny. :P

I just remembered that Casey Kimbrel (nee Gearsmith, one of my auto mechanics) hired two teenagers to help him run his used car dealership. One of those teenagers is Ostara Mistarra, an infallibly good witch who is presently vacationing with her mother and the rest of her coven at their lodge on Hoar Mountain (right next door to the campsite with the Tri-Fruhm sorority and their werewolves, even).

I guess the commute from the mountains to Bluewater Village-on-Pleasantview isn't so bad if you ride a broomstick.

(That reminds me: You know how a Simmy man takes the woman's surname for his own if she's the one who proposes marriage to him? Would it still be called a maiden name if it's a man who did that?)

It's an interesting idea, but would sadly mean that the teens in my game would miss out on school and all teenage clique shenanigans if I want to stay realistic - on top of their usual Maxis education, I have a functional playable school à Inge's system where they study skills and badges and wreck havoc during recess and lunch break There's also a lot of socializing going on - especially during the weekends - with parties, get-togethers, outings and so forth, especially for the more outgoing Popularity/Pleasure/Romance sims. Since 5 days = one year in my game, going on a +3-day vacation would essentially mean that the teen sims in question would miss out on a lot of stuff... the same goes for large families who basically have weddings, birthday parties and funerals every few days or so across the neighborhood.

But maybe for the more reclusive sims/smaller families... hmm. It might be fun to try in a fresh hood where there aren't so many sims and goings-on to miss out on while they're gone I like the college at a vacation destination idea, too.

You could always give your school summer vacation.

Oh yes, that's something else that I forgot - I use Phaenoh's summer vacation mod so my sims have the entire summer of school. Some families wait and go away then, others go away over the weekends (from Friday evening until Sunday evening/Monday morning) and others just go when they feel like it! As I'm currently playing a 'hood with no community (i.e. local) college sims who want to go to university have to go abroad to one of the vacation destinations for 8 nights in order to do a degree. I quite like the idea of family members going to visit them whilst they're studying. On the whole, though, my sims only go on vacation when they roll the want to do so - either to the destination of their choice if they roll a specific want, or if they roll the generic "vacation" want then I choose - based on a variety of things, like their hobbies, their personalities, their aspirations and also their family circumstances, like whether or not they have a family member studying abroad or if they own a vacation home.

Sadly I haven't been able to get the mod to increase vacation times to work. I had an idea that *may* fix it, so I'll see if that works, but I'm trying to not get my hopes up :-(

It's pretty easy to go into SimPE and adjust the vacations days left anyway.

I think one of the perks in Freetime fixes that. Longer vacation time, I mean.

i usually let my sims stay on holidays for 5 days sometimes less, rarely more. i only sent them on a vacation for 7 days three times, but twice ended the vacation early (it got boring and the hotel was all trashed because that stupid maid never cleaned anything). on the third time i stayed there for the whole 7 days with a big pre-made family (forgot who they were) but when their vacation ended a glitch happened and they couldn't check out. they just glitched and stood near reception desk with all those routing issues so i just quit the game and never played them again.

It's worse when that stupid maid blocks your bed so you can't use it. She's like, "Welp...I just made this bed. Time to stand here by the bed and stare at the wall for eighteen hours straight. What's that? You want to sleep in this bed? Well, tough noogies, because I just made this bed all neat and pretty and you're not messing it up for me!"

That's why I added free campgrounds to Twikki Island and Takemizu Village: Not only is it free to sleep in a tent, but you also don't have to worry about that buggy maid blocking your beds. I've also had that occasional glitch where your room's rental fee gets charged two or three times as soon as my Sims get off the shuttle; the Blossom Wood Hotel has done this to me a few times already. At most, my Sims will stay at a hotel for one night, just to get all the hotel mementos like the room service one; then it's right back to the campsite with them.

You need to go to Paladin's Place and download his fixes for the BV hotel maid and bellhop. They will make the maid actually clean and not stand around blocking the bed and will get the bellhop to repair things.

3-4 days, maybe 5 if I am taking them down to some really fancy place.