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If you send all or part of a household on vacation, and send another household to the same subhood, the household members can meet each other on community lots in that destination - even the ones who stayed home. However, if you send a family on vacation, and leave them there to go back to the main hood, sims on vacation can still show up on community lots at home. A little hiccup in the programming that never got fixed.
Therefore, I save with the family on the lot at the end of their rotation, finish out the rotation, then return to each family I want to send on vacation and send them. The vacation neighborhoods then get a free subrotation, played much like my University subrotation, with each family played for roughly one day of their vacation in turn, using teleporters if I want them to visit each other (you can't invite anyone to join you on a vacation lot by phone once you're there, more's the pity), until everyone has used up their time, at which point I sent them home and save the lot ready for the start of their next day's rotation.
My theory of sim time passage is, that every day is a composite, functioning much like days in normal human memory. Most days in most lives are very like each other and get compressed into routine events - all that work/school/housework/sleeping runs together into a sense of time passing. Certain events take up more space in our memory because more or bigger things happened. This is why the time scales of University and Vacation are different in the game - because the time is finite, we are more conscious of it passing, therefore we cram more into it, therefore it takes up more space in our memory than the larger spans of time spent on the daily grind. So there's no need to synch vacation time with ordinary time.
And if a need does arise for story reasons (if I wanted Roxie Sharpe to elope with Mr. Big while her boyfriend Jonah Powers was on tour with his band in Three Lakes, for example), that's what the aging off cheat is for. I would give more days to the sims who stayed home, rather than subtracting them from the sims who took the trip. As far as I'm concerned, Vacations exist to give me more time with my favorite sims, without giving them absurdly long lifespans and/or huge career boosts in relation to the rest of the neighborhood.
I can barely tell what day it is in my real life. Keeping close track of time in my sims game would be way too much work and would frazzle rather than relax me.
Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr is
Sim Media Res .
Widespot,
Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and
Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)