for those of us itching to travel, not having a new horizon to set your sights sometimes feels a little unnatural, or even bleak. But have no fear, since I am currently in what I consider to be a travel dry spell, I have some ideas on how to cope.
If you’re not sure how to choose your travel companions or haven’t had enough terrible experiences yet to steer you in the right direction (which is away from uncool travelers), let me help you.
Instead of resolutions, I’ve started making specific individual goals for the year. Some are related to life, some to career, some to yoga poses I want to nail, many to travel.
Sometimes travel comes across as this daunting, unattainable thing that only rich people or somehow privileged people can do, but it isn’t. And as with anything else in life, if you want to travel badly enough, there’s ways to make it happen.
There’s a problem in America where America thinks it’s OK to only know English, because everyone else all over the world should just figure out how to talk to you. And for those of us who don’t have parents who speak a different mother tongue or didn’t seek to learn a second or third language, we have to do better than that when we travel.
No matter how much you travel, there’s always a chance you’ll forget that sometimes things just don’t go right. I had to re-learn five valuable lessons from my recent trips, so here they are as a good reminder.
Have you ever fallen in love with someone, almost as though you knew them before you met them? As though it were a return to each other and not a first encounter? Well I think that feeling happens with places too.
There’s no shortage of theories out there on when the deals are best: Tuesdays, always Tuesdays because the sales go up on Mondays. No, Monday is best but it has to be at some off-peak time like 4:00 a.m. Also, don’t search too many times from the same computer because they (they as in the powers that control flight prices, whoever that technically is) will know you really want it and you’ll never see the deal. So what’s really true?
If I had a dollar for every time someone told me I’ll never find a mate if I keep traveling, I could take all those ill gotten bills and buy a plane ticket. I had someone even say to me recently: “When you finally settle down, you’ll be able to say hey husband, look at all these great things I did before.” As though I’ll be dead and grounded with a ring on my finger.
There’s always a post or an article or an e-book about how to live a life filled with travel, but I think it may come down to why some people have lives more peppered with travel than others do.