The weekend stretched before us, and my husband, Bill, and I wanted to have some fun.

"Let's go to the beach," Bill said. He got online and started searching for an affordable room for two nights. There were no vacancies at the places where we usually stayed, and the hotels with available rooms had priced them too high for our weekend budget.

Instead of pouting, we decided to make the best of it. If we couldn't go to the beach, we decided we could still have a good time — in Greenville.

It was time for a STAY-cation.

In a season marked by $4-a-gallon gasoline and escalating prices for food and lodging, staycations are all the rage. It's a stay-at-home vacation — a holiday that involves sleeping in your own bed and in-town driving. There's no packing, loading and unloading the car or "how-much-further-till-we-get-there" grumbling.

When you're on a staycation, you take advantage of what's available in your hometown. Unfortunately, on the weekend Bill and I had our local vacation, there wasn't a festival planned in the area and Greenville's Sunday in the Park concerts hadn't yet started. But Bill and I still had plenty of options for enjoying ourselves right here at home.

I think the key to a staycation is to approach staying home the same way you would approach going away. Bill and I agreed that we wouldn't do the laundry or mow the lawns during our staycation — because we couldn't do those chores if we actually were away from home. This was a weekend set aside for fun, not cleaning out closets.

We decided on a budget for our staycation that was a bit more than we would normally spend on a typical weekend at home — but far less than we would have spent if we went to the beach for the weekend.

So, here's what we did on our spring staycation:

On Friday night after we left the office, we went out for a romantic meal — complete with cocktails and dessert — at a new restaurant. The bill and the calories were more than we usually spend on a meal, but after all, we were on staycation. We lingered over coffee, in no hurry to get back home.

We slept in on Saturday morning and, over a biscuit breakfast, decided which movie to see. After the matinee, we headed home for an afternoon nap. Instead of spending $20 to play miniature golf at a pirate-themed course at the beach, we enjoyed a laughter-filled round of golf in our family room on our Wii game system. Then we grilled hamburgers and, after dinner, lingered outside under the stars. When we got sleepy, we headed inside to our own comfortable bed — not the lumpy mattress we might have encountered in a hotel.

A friend who lives in an apartment complex invited us to join her at her pool on Sunday, so we grabbed some takeout sandwiches and drove across town to have a picnic with her and splash around the pool. The cool water made Greenville's unseasonably hot 100-degree temperatures bearable, even without the ocean breeze we'd have had at the beach. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening lounging on the sofa reading a novel, one of my favorite things to do on vacation, while Bill watched a baseball game.

We returned to work on Monday relaxed and refreshed.

And isn't that ultimately what any vacation — or staycation — is all about?

Jane Hudson can be contacted at 329-9577 or jhudson@coxnc.com.