The Girls Trip You Actually Need On burnout, group chats, and the radical act of doing absolutely nothing together

There is a version of the group trip that everybody knows. The one with the shared Google Doc. The color-coded itinerary. The restaurant reservations made three weeks out. The group chat that becomes a part-time job. The coordinating. The exhaustion of having so much fun that you need a vacation to recover from your vacation.

We love that trip. We have all been on that trip.

But there is another kind of girls trip. A quieter one. The kind where the only thing on the agenda is a porch, a coastline, and the kind of conversation that only happens when nobody is looking at their phone.

That is the trip we are talking about today.

You Don’t Have to Be Tired After Your Trip

Somewhere along the way, the girls trip became another thing to optimize. Another thing to plan perfectly, document thoroughly, and return from more depleted than when you left.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The best trips — the ones people actually remember years later — are rarely the ones that were packed the tightest. They are the ones where something unexpected happened because there was space for it to. A conversation that went three hours. A walk that turned into a swim. A dinner that nobody wanted to end. A morning where nobody had anywhere to be and nobody pretended otherwise.

That is what a summer weekend on the Mendocino coast looks like when you stop trying to make it into content.

What the Offline Weekend Actually Is

We built the Offline Weekend at Mar Vista because we kept watching the same thing happen. Guests would arrive wound tight, phones out, already composing the caption in their heads. And then — somewhere around hour six — something would shift. The farm has a way of doing that.

The Offline Weekend is three days on nine acres of working farm on the Mendocino coast. We give every guest a Field Kit when they arrive — a journal, Fuji instax film, washi tape, a box for your phone, and a guidebook to the weekend. Deanna leads a tea foraging walk through the garden. There are watercolors in the Glass House, records on the phonograph, lawn games in the afternoon light, and two shared dinners that go longer than anyone planned.

There is no itinerary you have to follow. Everything on the schedule is optional. We mean that.

What happens instead is better. The group chat goes quiet. The photos get taken on film. The conversations get longer. Someone picks up a paintbrush for the first time since middle school. Someone else sleeps eight hours and wakes up and cannot believe it.

You come home rested. Actually rested.

The Case for Less

Here is what a summer road trip weekend can look like when you stop adding things to it.

Mornings for hiking and exploring the coast — the bluffs, the tidepools, the kind of walk where you don’t check your phone the whole time. Maybe you even left it somewhere a while ago. Crafternoons in the Glass House — watercolors, puzzles, records, good company, no agenda. An afternoon at the Gualala Farmers Market. A literary detour to the Frog Bookstore. Two shared dinners with others who are choosing to be screen free.

No schedule. No matching outfits required. No group chat coordination beyond the one message it takes to book the cottage.

Just the Secret Coast. Your people. And nine acres with nowhere you need to be.

Love + Light

Deanna + Cab